Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Release version 1.2.6 of Tonatiuh

Tonatiuh release 1.2.6 is now available from the main Tonatiuh website. This new version of the program includes new features that facilitates:

  • The modeling of heliostats fields and, thereby, the modeling of solar tower systems;
  • The testing of different atmospheric transmittance models;
  • The ray casting process, allowing the user to select the objects that should be taken into account during the process.

These new features are:

  • A new wizard-type plug-in that facilitates the simulation of solar tower systems. The wizard generates a heliostat field taking as input from the user: (1) a text file with the coordinates of the center of the bases of the heliostats that compose the heliostat field and (2) a component Tonatiuh file describing the geometry of the heliostats (it is assumed that the geometry of all heliostats are the same).
  • Several new atmospheric transmittance plug-ins.
  • A new reflectance material plug-in, which allows the user to independently define the slope error and the reflectivity ray error of a mirror-like surface.
  • The possibility for the user of selecting which of the surfaces in the scene should not be taking into account during the ray tracing process.
  • The resolution of a bug that made the program crash when the user tries to "undo" the elimination of a One-Axis tracker.
  • The resolution of a bug associated with the definition of the Sun position using the SunPositionCalculator? window (the error is related to an incorrect conversion from degrees to radians).

During the coming weeks we will be developing tutorials showing how to use this new features, and we will be posting them in the tutorials section of the Tonatiuh website.

Thanks for using Tonatiuh and for supporting its development with your comments, suggestions, and questions.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hello. Could someone explain how to use the "Analyzer Node" tool in version 2.0.1? Also, could you provide some further information on your "500 Heliostat" tutorial on how to create the matrix of heliostat efficiencies? Thanks very much.