Activities for week 27 of 2009 (06/29-07/03)

This week we plan to finish a paper for the 2009 SolarPACES conference in Berlin, presenting the results of a preliminary comparison between Tonatiuh and SolTRACE, which is a optical analysis program developed by NREL to analyze the optical behavior of solar concentrating systems.

Basically, what we have done is to simulate three concentrating systems with both programs, and compare the results. The concentrating systems simulated are simplified versions of:

• The EuroDish parabolic dish.
• The LS3 parabolic trough.
• The NREL' SolarFurnace

During this week we will finish the analysis of the results provided by the programs, draw the appropriate conclusion, and include them in the SolarPACES paper, complementing the written presentation with tables, and graphics where appropriate.

Amaia will run the Tonatiuh simulations, Pierre and Rakel the SolTRACE simulations, and Manuel, with the support of Victor, will finish writing the paper for SolarPACES, and will upload it to the SolarPACES website.

Activities for week 26 of 2009 (06/22-06/26)

This week we plan to improve Tonatiuh and its support infrastructure in the following ways:

1. The development team will discuss and agreed upon a versioning scheme for the program, since it is long over due.
2. Victor will carry out a thorough review of Tonatiuh Unit Tests.
3. Amaia and Manuel will review the main wiki at tonatiuh.googlecode.com to correct detected errors and increase consistency.
4. Manuel will add to the this blog a slide show of Tonatiuh and Tonatiuh related Mathematica screen captures, to provide a feeling of Tonatiuh's GUI and flux calculation capabilities.