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bifacial_radiance

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Introduction

bifacial_radiance contains a series of Python wrapper functions to make working with RADIANCE easier, particularly for the PV researcher interested in bifacial PV performance. For more information, check out our documentation, Tutorials in the form of Jupyter Notebooks, or reffer to our Wiki and Issues page.

Installation

https://youtu.be/4A9GocfHKyM This video shows how to install the bifacial_radiance software and all associated software needed. More info on the Wiki. Instructions are also shown below.

For detailed instructions of how to install bifacial_radiance, you can also refer to the installation guide

GUI!

A GUI has been added in version 3.0. The GUI reads/writes all input parameters necessary to run a simulation, and runs the specified simulation by calling the correct functions with the specified parameters. So no need to use a journal or a script! But you still need to install following the procedure below.

To run the gui, import bifacial_radiance and run bifacial_radiance.gui()

GUI

Usage

We have a tutorial video, showing how the program is structured, how to use the Jupyter tutorials and the GUI. You can watch it here Tutorial Webinar, with the slides available here.

Check out the Jupyter Tutorial Notebooks to see detailed examples of the capacities of bifacial_radiance. The Intro examples and the readthedocs documentation also provide a good starting point.

Contributing

We need your help to make bifacial_radiance a great tool! Please see the Contributing page for more on how you can contribute. The long-term success of bifacial_radiance requires substantial community support.

License

Bifacial_radiance open source code is copyrighted by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy and licensed with BSD-3-Clause terms, found here.

Getting Support

If you suspect that you may have discovered a bug or if you'd like to change something about bifacial_radiance, then please make an issue on our GitHub issues page.

bifacial_radiance questions can be asked on Stack Overflow and tagged with the bifacial_radiance tag.

The bifacial-radiance google group has just started, and will be used for discussing various topics of interest to the bifacial-radiance community. We also make new version announcements on the google group.

Citing

If you use bifacial_radiance in a published work, please cite:

Ayala Pelaez and Deline, (2020). bifacial_radiance: a python package for modeling bifacial solar photovoltaic systems. Journal of Open Source Software, 5(50), 1865, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01865

Please also cite the DOI corresponding to the specific version of bifacial_radiance that you used. bifacial_radiance DOIs are listed at Zenodo.org

Additional bifacial_radiance publications with validation of the software include:

Deline, Chris, and Ayala, Silvana. Bifacial_Radiance. Computer Software. https://github.com/NREL/bifacial_radiance. USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Solar Energy Technologies Office (EE-4S). 17 Dec. 2017. Web. doi:10.11578/dc.20180530.16. https://www.osti.gov/doecode/biblio/6869
Ayala Pelaez S, Deline C, Greenberg P, Stein JS, Kostuk RK. Model and validation of single-axis tracking with bifacial PV. IEEE J Photovoltaics. 2019;9(3):715-721. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8644027 and https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy19osti/72039.pdf (pre-print, conference version)
Ayala Pelaez, Deline C, MacAlpine M, Marion B, Stein J, Kostuk K. Comparison of Bifacial Solar Irradiance Model Predictions with Field Validation. IEEE J Photovoltaics. 2019; 9(1):82-87. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8534404

Or check our Github Wiki for a complete list of publications.