Peak radiation analysis in Ecotect 2011

Hi.

I did a simple ecotect analysis of a peak radiation on a simple surface through Geco. Surface was created by lofting two curves.

I used a Galapagos solver to find the shape of the surface that "accepts" the highest amount of solar radiation. Each control point of those two lofted curves represents the Genome of the Galapagos.

I took Adelaide in Australia as a weather file.

But, the final result was not what I was hopping for.

First thing, I am confused of the way in which my surface is oriented - it is oriented (angled) towards the +Y axis. Am I getting it wrong, or the sun appears on the north, at the Earth's southern hemisphere?

Why am I then getting the result from ecotect, like the sun is appearing on the southern side (-Y axis) ?

Second thing that bothers me is the shape of the surface. From a pure logic, I would expect my final surface to be some sort of a flat surface. Am I wrong or the flat one will gain most of the solar gain?

But Galapagos gave me some sort free formed one. Why is that?

Thank you for the help.

Attachments:

grass to ecotect connection with geco.gh, 19 KB
grass to ecotect connection with geco.3dm, 46 KB

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Igor Mitrić Lavovski on August 11, 2012 at 5:34am

Yes, the sun appears on the north for southern hemisphere...

Permalink Reply by djordje on August 11, 2012 at 6:55am

Thank you for the reply Igor.
Then there is a problem in either Ecotect or Geco? It seems one of those two is always taking the direction of south (-Y axis) as the direction from which the sun appears?!

Permalink Reply by Igor Mitrić Lavovski on August 11, 2012 at 6:58am

for Geco I am not sure. I did not use it. But Ecotect should take data from wea. file

Activate sunpath in ecotect for your location, shows you sun position

Permalink Reply by djordje on August 11, 2012 at 7:22am

Nothing happens when I check both "daily sun path" and "annual sun path". Or one of them:

Permalink Reply by Joseph Heath on August 11, 2012 at 9:17pm

Your normals are facing the wrong way. The sun is coming from the north but you are calculating the gains on the south facing side of the mesh. Put a flip mesh component after the mesh uv and you should be all good.

Permalink Reply by djordje on August 12, 2012 at 5:57pm

Thank you for the reply Joseph. It worked now, after I flipped the mesh. Thanks!

By the way I noticed an interesting thing. I tried to flip the surface, instead of mesh, and suppose that this will have an effect on mesh too, as I am "making" a mesh from a surface. But for some reason it did not - the surface normal direction did changed due to Flip command, but the mesh normal direction stayed the same. Take a look:

green vector (directed towards right) represents the new (changed) normal direction of the surface, and the red vectors (directed towards left) represent the normal directions of the mesh faces.

Can anyone explain me, why is this happening?

Thank you.

Attachments: