Food4Rhino

Vitality 2.0

Another set of tools that were developed during the project called Vitality District

http://www.vitality-district.com/.

The aim of the project was  to design and optimize photovoltaic planning during the design phase of building groups and districts, coordinated with consumption profiles, building topology and solutions for energy communities, storage and greening.

Quicksun

Fast calculation of solar radiation on exterior surfaces. It utilizes CPU and GPU (NVIDIA cards only) parallel processing. It recognizes if a suitable GPU is not available and automatically switches to CPU computation only.

It provides fast output of hourly and annual data.  The results component has  embedded a threshold functionality for minimum irradiation (convenient for determining PV placement). The setup is very simplified, there will be some future improvements, such as better definition of materials etc.

Requirements: installation of CUDA Toolkit 11.4.

Vitality Tools

Set of tools for building modelling and analyzing, dedicated to solar and energy analysis.

In process:

• Improvement of solar analysis algorithm
• Voxel based building generation
• Fast energy analysis
• Tools for storage calculation (batteries, hydrogen, etc.)

Vitality 1.0

PV component: The “PV component” delivers fast calculation of the Yield values of PV panels (kWh/m2). Part of the input are drop down menus. First menu enables to select the type of the photovoltaics module based on different mounting types (roof vs. facade) and ventilation. The second menu enables to select the type of PV cell (e.g. monocrystalline, polycrystalline, etc.)

VITALITY component: The “Vitality component” compares the electricity production of the allocated roof + façade surfaces with the electric energy demand of the building. For each hour is calculated the order of the panels according to the corresponding hourly electricity production. In addition, if the PV panel during the hour based on the order still contributes to the building’s energy demand, then the PV’s  produced electricity is converted to income with price as if buying from the energy supplier (from the grid). If the panel’s production already exceeded the building’s demand for the hour, it is converted to income with price as if selling it to the energy supplier (to the grid). The sum of the hourly incomes gives the annual income for each panel. Therefore, by providing the required average payback time are selected only PV panels which satisfy this threshold. In addition, if the threshold for maximum available roof area is less than 100 %, the panels are further sorted and selected based on this threshold. The still needed profile of the electric energy demand of the building is also calculated.