Time Periods

Hey all,

I found the DIVA components to be quite intuitive and overall great. One thing I find it falls short on is on regard to setting time periods. It would make it a really useful tool if when calculating light levels, or solar radiation one could set the months, days (even hours) for the calculations to be based on.

Maybe this has been done already and I simply didn't find the way to do it. Is this so?

All the best and congrats on the work.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Jeff Niemasz on December 27, 2012 at 6:50am

Hi Peter,

The method we are using for calculating annual solar irradiation was described by Robinson and Stone. It uses a Radiance module called GenCumulativeSky and basically creates a composite sky from the weather file to run a ray trace. The advantages over other methods is that it is fast, but not intended for finer time resolutions. An alternative method which is more resolved but time consuming is to use the DAYSIM engine which generates hourly illuminance and irradiance at a sensor. This method is described in more detail here and here. We will be implementing an option for this method on the rhino and grasshopper of DIVA in a future release.

Jeff

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