Latest updates
      Back to home
      1. Knowledge base
      2. Latest updates

      Updates March 2020

      Better layouts, faster simulations, energy bug fixes

      pvDesign - version 3.11.4

      We hope that you and your beloved ones are and stay healthy. We wanted to give you an update with regard to the current COVID-19 situation and our technical improvements:

      The RatedPower team is fully operating as usual and working 100% remotely. As we are a cloud-based software company, our experienced sales and support team is used to working online; they are fully available to assist you.

      We are committed to continue improving pvDesign and helping you optimize your PV projects. In March we made changes to the grouping algorithm, and we implemented a new calculation architecture. You can find below a summary of each change:

      • Better layouts: The grouping algorithm has been improved to make the power station shape as squared as possible. This results in more visually pleasing layouts, and less power stations with an elongated shape.

      Better layouts

      • New calculation architecture: We changed how the calculations are made in pvDesign so that it is easier to use the power of the distributed computation cluster. In the short term, this means that simulations will be somewhat faster than before. In the long term we expect to be able to build better algorithms which take full advantage of our distributed computing capabilities.
      • Energy bug fixes: We detected and fixed two bugs which were causing the energy simulations to be off. The first was related to the incrusted PS configuration, and it caused the simulation to slightly overestimate the DC array generation. The second was a mistake in the calculation of the DNI irradiance which affected a very small number of simulations but which resulted in implausible results.

      We made the following bug fixes and improvements:

      • We added the clearance distance between rows to the description of the pitch in the New Design. The clearance distance is the free space between one row and the next, in the direction of the pitch distance.
      • We fixed a bug in the New Design page which could cause the re-calculate process to fail.
      • We fixed a bug in the regular blocks configuration which resulted in layouts disjointed from the substation in the specific power mode.
      • We fixed a bug caused the project sheet to be missing for some simulations.