Artificial Lighting Analysis

[Chingiz Asadzade]

Dear Ryan,

I hope you are doing well.

I have recently finished my Master's Thesis, where I worked with VI-Suite for Radiance analysis and used the results of irradiations for I-V curve simulations of different solar modules with specific shading patterns. I used the gendaylit function, and as we know, there is no Direct Normal Irradiance (DNI) and Diffuse Horizontal Irradiance (DHI), or other pairs of irradiances input in VI-Suite. Therefore, I modified some lines in the code to extract irradiance data from the EPW file while utilizing the gendaylit function. This can be found as a fork on my name on GitHub, and perhaps it can be helpful for the further development of the add-on. Most probably, there will be more things to add to my small changes.

Before moving on to my question, I would like to thank you for creating this tool and always trying to help users who have questions.

As an expansion of my work, I would like to conduct artificial lighting analysis for different structures with bifacial solar panels mounted on them, creating self-shading scenarios. I've watched your tutorials about mesh geometries and light sources with IES file input.

Is it possible to create two light sources with the properties of the sun to run simulations? Alternatively, is it possible to give the artificial light source the AM 1.5G spectrum?

How would you recommend conducting artificial lighting simulations without the sky context by just having two light sources representing the sun, as it is not possible to create two suns with gendaylit?

Thank you for your time and assistance.

Best,

Chingiz

[VI-Suite]

Not 100% sure what you mean but if you just want two suns, a la Tatooine, Radiance does, perhaps surprisingly, allow that. 

The following text in the LiVi Context text file associated with a Text edit node attached to the LiVi Context node will give you two suns and no sky. You just take the sun part of the LiVi Context text file from multiple context exports and combine them together back into the LiVi Context text file. You probably, as I have done below, have to give each sun it's own name.

As you know your way around the code I guess you could automate this by running gendaylit twice and combing the text outputs before passing them back for storage in the LiVi Context node.

Ryan

void light solar1
0
0
3 4.048e+06 4.048e+06 4.048e+06

solar1 source sun
0
0
4 -0.013313 -0.967903 0.250971 0.5

void light solar2
0
0
3 1.646e+06 1.646e+06 1.646e+06

solar2 source sun
0
0
4 -0.628645 -0.771262 0.099806 0.5