VOSTOK is a command-line tool to compute a detailed model of incoming solar radiation distribution on a patch of land, including structures like buildings and vegetation, represented by a 3D point cloud data set. "Vostok" is also the russian word for "east" - the direction in which the sun rises.
The program is written in C++ and makes use of the "SOLPOS.H" library to compute the angular position of the sun in the sky for a given location on earth and a given moment in time. SOLPOS.H was created by the U.S. Department of Energy National Renewable Energy Laboratory ( http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/codesandalgorithms/solpos/ ) and released under the public domain.
VOSTOK works by transforming the input point cloud into a voxel volume with configurable resolution (voxel size). The voxels are represented as a sparse octree, and incoming sunlight and shadowing effects are simulated by raycasting on the voxel octree geometry. Raycasting is parallelized with OpenMP to make full use of multi-core processors.
In order to build VOSTOK, you need to have the GNU C++ compiler (g++) and GNU Make (or compatible tools) installed on your computer. Additional third-party libraries are not required.
The VOSTOK GitHub repository contains two folders "Debug" and "Release". Each folder contains a Makefile for a specific build configuration: In "Debug" configuration, additional information for debugging is compiled into the binary, but its computing performance is reduced. For productive use, it is recommended to use the faster "Release" configuration.
To build VOSTOK with one of the two configurations, open your command prompt and navigate to the respective configuration folder. Then type "make" and hit [Return]. The program will now be built, and after a couple of seconds you should find a binary named "vostok" in the same folder.
To run VOSTOK, you need to provide a .sol file containing information about the input files, the location of the scene, the time period for which the solar potential shall be calculated, etc.
An exemplary .sol file looks like this:
example.xyz
example.xyz
1.0
48.0
16.0
1
2016
1
31
1
60
1
example_solPot_January2016.xyz
1
The meaning of each line entry is as follows:
line 1 File with points used for shadowing
line 2 Point cloud for solar pot. calculation
line 3 Voxel size for shadow voxels
line 4 Latitude of scene in deci degrees
line 5 Longitude of scene in deci degrees
line 6 Time zone
line 7 Year of calculation
line 8 First day of calculation
line 9 Last day of calculation
line 10 Day step
line 11 Minutes step
line 12 Enable shadowing
line 13 Output file name
line 14 Enable multi threading
The input file (line 1) contains the points which are used for shadowing the scene.
The second file (line 2) corresponds to the points for which the solar potential is calculated. The file must contain xyz coordinates and normals nxnynz, each in subsequent columns seperated by blanks. Example with four points:
78.750000 344.250000 40.615002 0.114376 0.220988 0.968547
79.250000 344.250000 40.542000 0.063874 0.249720 0.966209
79.750000 344.250000 40.520000 -0.196111 -0.040646 0.979739
80.250000 344.250000 40.956001 -0.187723 -0.375608 0.907568
If the .sol file is adjusted and the input files are provided, run VOSTOK via
vostok.exe example.sol
The tool will first generate a .vostokmeta file and then run the solar potential calculation. On your screen, somethin like the following messages should appear:
------------------------------------------------------
Shadow points file path: example.xyz
Query points file path: example.xyz
Output file(s) path: example_solPot_January2016.xyz
Use Multithreading: 1
Lat: 48 degrees
Lon: 16 degrees
Time Zone: 1
Year: 2016
Day Start: 1
Day End: 31
Days step: 1
Minutes step: 60
Shadow mode: 1
Shadow voxel size: 1 m
------------------------------------------------------
No metafile for example.xyz found. Creating it...finished.
Point cloud size: 270.5 x 170 x 68.084
Required octree volume size: 512 x 512 x 512
Required octree depth: 9
Building octree... finished.
Computing irradiation for each query point...
Day 1 Sunrise: 07:51 Sunset: 16:06
Day 2 Sunrise: 07:51 Sunset: 16:07
Day 3 Sunrise: 07:51 Sunset: 16:08
Day 4 Sunrise: 07:51 Sunset: 16:09
Day 5 Sunrise: 07:51 Sunset: 16:10
Day 6 Sunrise: 07:51 Sunset: 16:11
Day 7 Sunrise: 07:51 Sunset: 16:13
Day 8 Sunrise: 07:50 Sunset: 16:14
Day 9 Sunrise: 07:50 Sunset: 16:15
Day 10 Sunrise: 07:49 Sunset: 16:16
Day 11 Sunrise: 07:49 Sunset: 16:17
Day 12 Sunrise: 07:48 Sunset: 16:19
Day 13 Sunrise: 07:48 Sunset: 16:20
Day 14 Sunrise: 07:47 Sunset: 16:21
Day 15 Sunrise: 07:47 Sunset: 16:23
Day 16 Sunrise: 07:46 Sunset: 16:24
Day 17 Sunrise: 07:45 Sunset: 16:26
Day 18 Sunrise: 07:44 Sunset: 16:27
Day 19 Sunrise: 07:44 Sunset: 16:28
Day 20 Sunrise: 07:43 Sunset: 16:30
Day 21 Sunrise: 07:42 Sunset: 16:31
Day 22 Sunrise: 07:41 Sunset: 16:33
Day 23 Sunrise: 07:40 Sunset: 16:34
Day 24 Sunrise: 07:39 Sunset: 16:36
Day 25 Sunrise: 07:38 Sunset: 16:38
Day 26 Sunrise: 07:37 Sunset: 16:39
Day 27 Sunrise: 07:36 Sunset: 16:41
Day 28 Sunrise: 07:34 Sunset: 16:42
Day 29 Sunrise: 07:33 Sunset: 16:44
Day 30 Sunrise: 07:32 Sunset: 16:45
Day 31 Sunrise: 07:31 Sunset: 16:47
The resulting file will contain the initial xyz coordinates, the nxnynz normals, and a new column with the calculated solar potential in Watt hours per square meter and day, summed up for the respective point.
React
Typescript
Django
Laravel
Facebook
Microsoft
Google
Alibaba
D3
Tencent