sun position VI

[djvillarreal]

Yes the issue is only with the 3D graph, everything else is working right, I think I can fix it my self. Thanks for the links, they will help a lot.

After 4 years of the last post I didn't think I would get a response, I'm greatly surprised!

Regards. 

[diarmaede]

Great program!  Thanks so much!

[Olli]

Hello,
I'm really happy that my sun position VI based on the SUNAE algorithm is still used by other people.

I added recently a feature, which calculates the incident angle on a surface with variable slope and azimuth. This is a very useful information e.g. for PV module performance analyses

The output is a table that contains all positions for a variable period (start date and duration of period) and variable intervals. Be carefully not to use too long periods with the smallest interval (1 minute), because the data size increments in a shift register after each loop.

There is another algorithm, which seems to be more accurate than the SUNAE, that I used in this VI. For my application the SUNAE is sufficient, but you might need a higher accuracy?!

Voilà: http://www.nrel.gov/midc/solpos/spa.html

It's ready to use and you can find also a link to  the c-code there.

The attached VI comes without any cosmetics and I use it only to calculate sun position tables for a data base. You can easily copy and paste the output table into an ASCII file or any table based software that recognizes the column delimiter (tabulator) and the end-of-line character. The time stamp is normally also recognized by data bases, excel and open office.

Feel free to use this VI and change it according to your needs!

Have fun!
Olli

[diarmaede]

Olli, wow!  That sounds like it would be really useful to me.  Unfortunately, I am running LV2012, so I cannot open your new VI.  If possible, could you save it to LV2012?  Thanks in advance.

[Olli]

Hello,
here is the LV8.6 version of the sun position calculation. This should work with most of the recent versions. I tested it yesterday with LV 2013.

Greetings!
Olli

p.s. the filesize of the old version is much larger than the allowed 6Mb...I had to compress it, but now I'm struggeling with the upload error message

"The contents of the attachment doesn't match its file type."

I tried it already with the browsers Chrome and Mozilla...is the *.zip format not recognised anymore? ...keep on trying!

[Olli]

...another try with Firefox