Shadows drawing

When the global scene is completed, you can have a look on the produced shadows for any given sun position, or any time in the year, by clicking on the button Shadow drawing.

Solar angles or time conditions may be easily modified to see the evolution during the year. After each parameter change, please click on the Shadows drawing button again for updating the shadow computation.

NB: This "Linear" shadow computation is a very complex process involving polygon intersection and union calculations, which sometimes may fail, giving erroneous results (i.e; part of the field is over- or under-shaded). If the program can detect the failure through it's internal checks, it uses an alternative computing method by distributing a grid of points on the PV area, and evaluating the shading state of each point. This second method is less precise, but leads always to reliable results.

To minimize such problems, please always position PV planes with a little gap between them and their support surface.

If you have defined a partition of your PV-field according to strings of modules, the partially shadowed string rectangles will also appear in yellow. The two shading factors will be displayed, indicating the lower and upper limits for the shading's real effect.

You also have an animation of the shadows drawing over a whole day. This simultaneously draws the curve of the loss factor on the beam component, and calculates the overall daily loss on beam component for a clear day.