Quantifying effects of the built environment on solar irradiance availability at building rooftops

Carlo Bianchi; Matthew Overby; Peter Willemsen; Amanda D. Smith; Rob Stoll; Eric R. Pardyjak

doi:10.1080/19401493.2019.1679259

Quantifying effects of the built environment on solar irradiance availability at building rooftops

Carlo Bianchi, Matthew Overby, Peter Willemsen, Amanda D. Smith, Rob Stoll, Eric R. Pardyjak

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

Solar radiation significantly impacts the performance of buildings and integrated renewable energy technologies. Surrounding buildings may reduce the amount of radiation reaching urban building rooftops, but may also enhance solar energy availability through scattering and reflections. These effects are difficult to quantify due to the complexity of urban geometries. Here, a new parameterization that quantifies the role of urban form on the availability of rooftop solar radiation, including the effects of mutual reflections and shading, is developed and tested. We find that available rooftop solar energy may be parameterized by a simple model using only plan area fraction, average building height, and building height standard deviation. The new model is developed using the building-resolving, ray-tracing based radiation transfer model QESRadiant to simulate incident solar irradiation in 125 city models over 11 latitudes for 13 days (18,000 simulations). The parameterization error is less than 5% for latitudes that encompass 95% of the world's population.

Original language	English (US)
Pages (from-to)	195-208
Number of pages	14
Journal	Journal of Building Performance Simulation
Volume	13
Issue number	2
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1080/19401493.2019.1679259
State	Published - Mar 3 2020
Externally published	Yes

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems (CBET)) under Grant 1512740. We wish to acknowledge Dr Arash Nemati Hayati (formerly of the Department of Mechanical Engineering) and Dr Steven Burian (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering) at the University of Utah for their helpful discussions with the authors during the development of this work. We also would also like to thank Dr Marina Neophytou, of the University of Cyprus, for providing the data set for Nicosia, Cyprus.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, © 2019 International Building Performance Simulation Association (IBPSA).

Keywords

Buildings
GPU computing
ray-tracing
rooftop PV
solar gains
urban form

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title = "Quantifying effects of the built environment on solar irradiance availability at building rooftops",

abstract = "Solar radiation significantly impacts the performance of buildings and integrated renewable energy technologies. Surrounding buildings may reduce the amount of radiation reaching urban building rooftops, but may also enhance solar energy availability through scattering and reflections. These effects are difficult to quantify due to the complexity of urban geometries. Here, a new parameterization that quantifies the role of urban form on the availability of rooftop solar radiation, including the effects of mutual reflections and shading, is developed and tested. We find that available rooftop solar energy may be parameterized by a simple model using only plan area fraction, average building height, and building height standard deviation. The new model is developed using the building-resolving, ray-tracing based radiation transfer model QESRadiant to simulate incident solar irradiation in 125 city models over 11 latitudes for 13 days (18,000 simulations). The parameterization error is less than 5% for latitudes that encompass 95% of the world's population.",

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note = "Funding Information: This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems (CBET)) under Grant 1512740. We wish to acknowledge Dr Arash Nemati Hayati (formerly of the Department of Mechanical Engineering) and Dr Steven Burian (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering) at the University of Utah for their helpful discussions with the authors during the development of this work. We also would also like to thank Dr Marina Neophytou, of the University of Cyprus, for providing the data set for Nicosia, Cyprus. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2019, {\textcopyright} 2019 International Building Performance Simulation Association (IBPSA).",

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Quantifying effects of the built environment on solar irradiance availability at building rooftops

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

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