Australian cable sizing standard, many bug fixes and improvements
pvDesign - backend v4.8.59, frontend v1.0.5
New Features
In January 2021 we released a new cable sizing standard, along with many smaller features and improvements.
- Australian cable sizing standard: Users can now choose to size the cables in the PV plant using the Standards Australia calculations. The changes are reflected in documents such as the Listing of Cables and the Design Report.
- Improved modules per string calculation: We improved the calculation of the number of recommended modules per string. The calculation is performed according to the Standard IEC 62548 and NEC 2017. Users can now override the value in the interface, and additionally new warning messages are shown.
- Interface improvements: We are working to improve the new interface introduced in December with new features and bug fixes. Some of the new features are the option to delete sites and meteorological data in design process, a message to refresh the session before it expires, and saving the user preferences so that choices such as webpage language and system of units are preserved after logging out.
- Automatic time shift calculation: When uploading meteorological data in a CSV file, or when getting data from API sources such as PVGIS, pvDesign will now automatically calculate the optimal time shift value to correct the deviation between the local time and the solar time used for the calculation of the sun position in the energy calculations.
- Improved horizon profile location: Now the horizon profile reference location will be chosen according to the available areas instead of the whole site. This will result in more accurate horizon profiles when the site is big and includes a substation area which is far away from the PV plant.
Improvements and bug fixes
We also made a huge number of bug fixes and small improvements following the release of the new interface in December. Find below a list of the changes:
- We improved the modules per string input in design process. It now shows detailed error messages.
- We added messages in the design process page informing users when they need to upload a site for the first time.
- It is now possible to sort the table of electrical configurations.
- The error pages for the projects and designs pages have been improved.
- We fixed many small errors and issues in the interface.
- We changed the algorithm which selects the best electrical configuration so that it now will select 1x1 configurations more often.
- We fixed a bug in the substation maximum voltage calculation for the IEE standard, and also fixed a bug in the short circuit impedance calculation.
- We improved the names of the entries in the BOQ.
- We fixed a bug which caused the names of the trenches in the layout to be wrong.
- We fixed a bug which could cause simulations of small PV plants to fail.
- We improved the positioning algorithm for string boxes and string inverters.
- We improved the meteorological CSV file uploading process, specifically for the TMY3 format, so that it can accept files with more flexibility than before.