skip to main content
OSTI.GOV title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: Recent Advancements in the Numerical Simulation of Surface Irradiance for Solar Energy Applications: Preprint

Conference ·
OSTI ID:1369114

This paper briefly reviews the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's recent efforts on developing all-sky solar irradiance models for solar energy applications. The Fast All-sky Radiation Model for Solar applications (FARMS) utilizes the simulation of clear-sky transmittance and reflectance and a parameterization of cloud transmittance and reflectance to rapidly compute broadband irradiances on horizontal surfaces. FARMS delivers accuracy that is comparable to the two-stream approximation, but it is approximately 1,000 times faster. A FARMS-Narrowband Irradiance over Tilted surfaces (FARMS-NIT) has been developed to compute spectral irradiances on photovoltaic (PV) panels in 2002 wavelength bands. Further, FARMS-NIT has been extended for bifacial PV panels.

Research Organization:
National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Renewable Power Office. Solar Energy Technologies Office
DOE Contract Number:
AC36-08GO28308
OSTI ID:
1369114
Report Number(s):
NREL/CP-5D00-67804
Resource Relation:
Conference: Presented at the 2017 IEEE 44th Photovoltaic Specialists Conference (PVSC), 25-30 June 2017, Washington, D.C.
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English