solarpy 0.1

Solar radiation model based on Duffie & Beckman "Solar energy thermal processes" (1974)

solarpy

Description	Python Solar Radiation model
Author	aqreed [e-mail]
Version	0.1
Python Version	3.6
Requires	Numpy, Matplotlib

This packages aims to provide a reliable solar radiation model, mainly based on the work of Duffie, J.A., and Beckman, W. A., 1974, "Solar energy thermal processes".

The main purpose is to generate a solar beam irradiance (W/m2) prediction on:

• any plane, thanks to the calculation of the solar vector in NED (North East Down) coordinates, suitable for its use in flight dynamics simulations...
• any place of the earth, taking into account the solar time wrt the standard time, geometric altitude, the latitude influence on solar azimuth and solar altitude as well as sunset/sunrise time and hour angle, etc.
• any day of the year, taking into account the variations of the extraterrestrial radiation, the equation of time, the declination, etc., throughout the year

Solar irradiance on the southern hemisphere on October 17, at sea-level 13.01UTC (plane pointing upwards)?

from solarpy.radiation import irradiance_on_plane
from solarpy.utils import day_of_the_year
import numpy as np

vnorm = np.array([0, 0, -1])  # plane pointing zenith
h = 0  # sea-level
n = day_of_the_year(10, 17)  # October 17
lat = -23.5  # southern hemisphere
hour, minute = 13, 1  # midday

irradiance_on_plane(vnorm, h, n, lat, hour, minute)

A dedicated Jupyter Notebook on beam irradiance can be found here.

Solar declination on August 5?

from solarpy.radiation import declination
from solarpy.utils import day_of_the_year

n = day_of_the_year(8, 5)  # August 5

declination(n)

Please find more notebooks on the 'examples' folder.

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NOTE: solarpy is under development and might change in the near future.

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Dependencies

This package depends on Python, NumPy and Matplotlib and is usually tested on Linux with the following versions:

Python 3.6, NumPy 1.16, Matplotlib 3.0

Installation

solarpy has been written in Python3

$ git clone https://github.com/aqreed/solarpy.git
$ cd solarpy
$ pip install -e .

Testing

solarpy recommends py.test for running the test suite. Running from the top directory:

$ pytest

To test coverage (also from the top directory):

$ pytest --cov

Bug reporting

Please feel free to open an issue on GitHub!

License

MIT (see COPYING)