Video tutorial: Solarize an imported building in Energy3D

We are pleased to announce that the solar panel and analysis tools in Energy3D (version 6.5.6 or higher) are now fully applicable to arbitrary imported structures. We hope that the new capabilities can help engineers who design rooftop solar systems and building solar facades to get their jobs done more efficiently and students who are interested in engineering to learn the theory and practice in an inquiry-based fashion. The six-minute video in this article demonstrates how easy it is to perform solar panel design and analysis in Energy3D. (Note: Unfortunately, the annotations in the video do not show if you are watching this on a smartphone.)

One of the handiest features is the automatic, real-time detection of the angle of the surface under a solar panel while the user is moving it. This feature basically allows the user to drag and drop a solar panel or a solar panel rack anywhere (on top of roofs, walls, or other surfaces) without having to set its tilt angle manually.

Solar heat map of a house with solar panels

Copy and paste a house with solar panels

Solar panels are "first-class citizens" in Energy3D as they are readily recognized by the built-in simulation engines. Energy3D provides a comprehensive list of properties that you can choose for each solar panel or solar panel array. For example, even the temperature coefficient of Pmax, a parameter that specifies the change of solar cell efficiency with regard to ambient temperature change, is supported. The software also has a variety of analytic tools for predicting the hourly, daily, and annual outputs of each solar panel and their sums. Interactive graphs are available to intuitively show the trends and allow the user to compare the outputs of different solar panels, of different arrays, on different days, or with different environmental settings (e.g., with or without a tree nearby).

These "native" solar panels are now completely blended into the "alien" meshes of structures imported into Energy3D from other CAD software or Google Earth. For example, once you drop a solar panel on a surface of the structure, it will stick to it. In other words, if you move or rotate the structure, the solar panel will go with it as if it were part of the original design. When you copy and paste the entire building, the solar panels will be copied and pasted as well (by the way, it takes only four clicks to copy and paste a building in Energy3D through the pop-up menu: one click to pick which one to act upon, one click to select the "Copy" action, one click to pick where to paste, and one last click to select the "Paste" action). That is to say, the native and alien meshes are completely meshed.