Radiation View Factor for Building Applications: Comparison of Computation Environments

摘要: Computation of view factors is required in several building engineering applications where radiative exchange takes place between surfaces such as ground and vertical walls or sloping thermal photovoltaics collectors. In this paper, factor computations are performed for bifacial solar photovoltaic (PV) collectors based on the finite element method (FEM) using two programming languages known Microsoft Excel-Visual Basic Applications (VBA) Python. The aim to determine computer response time well performance terms accuracy convergence numerical solution. To run simulations Python, an open source just-in-time (JIT) compiler called Numba was used same program also a macro VBA. It observed that simulation significantly decreased Python when compared This decrease due increase total number iterations from 400 million 250 billion given case. Results demonstrated 71–180 times faster than VBA and, therefore, offers better platform analysis modelling PV computation significant challenge.