Increased Twitter and Facebook integration

The posts on this blog, the modifications in the "updates" and "downloads" sections of the main Tonatiuh website, and the posts in the "Journal Entries" section of the Tonatiuh project pages at Ohloh will all be published in "The Tonatiuh Chronicles" Facebook page, and the "tonatiuhrt" Twitter page.

This blog is now advertised in Facebook

I just created a page in Facebook about this blog. The name of the page is also "The Tonatiuh Chronicles". Its link is here.

I used RSS Graffiti to ensure that the posts on this blog are published on the Wall of the Facebook page.

Optical simulation of large solar scale tower system

From Tonatiuh Blog Figures

We are starting to test the capabilities of Tonatiuh to simulate the optical behavior of large scale solar tower systems. The tower system shown in the Figure has a North heliostat field of 2268 large heliostats.

Basic refraction plug-in

We just finished the development of a material plug-in to simulate basic refractive behavior. To test the plug-in we have modeled with Tonatiuh a Campbell-Stokes sunshine recoder.

In the upper part of the video above you can see the Tonatiuh simulation of the functioning of the Campbell-Stokes sunshine recorder in a cloudless day. Because of the polar mounting of the device and the geometric properties of the sphere, direct sunlight is continuously concentrated upon the recording card as the Sun crosses the sky during a cloudless day.

In the lower part of the video above you can see the simulation of the evolution with time of the solar radiation spot incident upon the sunshine recording card.

Preliminary valitation of Tonatiuh

Yesterday, I added a new video to the Tonatiuh raytracer video channel at YouTube.

It is an eight minutes static pictures presentation about the preliminary validation of Tonatiuh, based on a PowerPoint presentation I gave at the 2009International Energy Agency's SolarPACES Symposium on September 17th in Berlin, Germany (see the September 20th post).

Tonatiuh project webpage page at the Ohloh website

Few days ago we created a project webpage for Tonatiuh at the Ohloh website. This website provides journaling and code analysis facilites for open source projects. We plan to use those facilities to:

• Increase the awareness of Tonatiuh among software developers and other potential users.
• To monitor the project activity and its popularity among users.
• To keep users and developers informed of our continous efforts to improve the qualtiy and usefulness of Tonatiuh , and to extent the program's functionality.

Among other things, in the Ohloh website you can obtain information about some of the Tonatiuh's software development project metrics, such as the computer lenguage breakdown structure shown on the following widget:

Tonatiuh's presentation at SolarPACES 2009

This last Thursday, September 17th, 2009, I presented the results of a comparison between Tonatiuh and SolTRACE in the SolarPACES 2009 symposium in Berlin.