What's new in Tonatiuh 1.2.6
Apr 11, 2012
- A new wizard-type plug-in that facilitates the simulation of solar tower systems. The wizard generates a heliostat field taking as input from the user:
- A text file with the coordinates of the center of the bases of the heliostats that compose the heliostat field
- A component Tonatiuh file describing the geometry of the heliostats (it is assumed that the geometry of all heliostats are the same).
- Several new atmospheric transmittance plug-ins.
- A new reflectance material plug-in, which allows the user to independently define the slope error and the reflectivity ray error of a mirror-like surface.
- The possibility for the user of selecting which of the surfaces in the scene should not be taking into account during the ray tracing process.
- The resolution of a bug that made the program crash when the user tries to "undo" the elimination of a One-Axis tracker.
- The resolution of a bug associated with the definition of the Sun position using the SunPositionCalculator window (the error is related to an incorrect conversion from degrees to radians).
New in Tonatiuh 1.2.4 (Jan 20, 2012)
- The scripting capabilities have been increased to the point that in this new release of the program any operation and functionality available to the users via the Graphics User Interface is now also available via scripting.
- The resolution of a bug that produced the unexpected closing of the program when the user tries to cast rays before creating the concentrating geometry.
- The resolution of a bug associated with storing a given Tonatiuh "scene" under very particular and uncommon conditions.
New in Tonatiuh 1.2.2 (Sep 29, 2011)
- The inappropriate sizing of the ray casting surface. In the previous release of Tonatiuh when the user modified the concentrating geometry, adding or substracting surfaces, the ray casting surface was not resized accordingly. This behavior has been corrected in the present release, so that the size of the ray casting surface is always adjusted to the concentrating geometry in order to increase the probabilities that the rays that are cast hit the concentrating geometry, decreasing the time needed to converge to accurate estimate of variables which are of interest to the user, such as the total power on target, the flux distribution in a given surface, etc.
- The erroneous generation of the seven-tuples of the photon map. In the previous release of the program, the field of the seven-tuple of a given photon that was associated with the side of the surface that the photon was hitting was incorrectly always set to -1, instead of setting it to 0 if the photon was hitting the rear side of the surface or to 1 if it was hitting the front side of the surface. This has been corrected in the present release of the program.
- The undesired possibility for the user of being able to associate a tracker to a TShapeKit. In the previous release of the program the user could select a TShapeKit and then include within it a Tracker element, with the operation resulting in a program crash, since Tracker elements are only intended to be use as child of TSeparatorKit elements. In the present release of the program, the program behavior has been modified to guarantee that the user can only associate a Tracker to a TSeparatorKit.
- The incapacity of the program to open Tonatiuh files containing TShapKit nodes that do not have associated a TShape node. In the previous release of the program, if the user closed a Tonatiuh session having defined a TShapeKit node without associating to it a valid TShape node as a child, the program was not able to subsequently open the given Tonatiuh file any more. The present release correct this.
New in Tonatiuh 1.2.1 (Aug 8, 2011)
- Corrects few minor bugs.
- Adds a new Compound Parabolic Concentrator (CPC) shape plug-in.
New in Tonatiuh 1.2.0 (Apr 23, 2011)
- This new release version of Tonatiuh is a relatively major release of the program. With respect to previous releases of the program, this new version changes:
- The way the surface from which primary rays are cast into the concentrating system is defined, and
- The way in which the intersection of a ray with a surface is stored, thus, changing the structure of the photon map's records.
New in Tonatiuh 1.1.5 (Mar 10, 2011)
- New features:
- A tracker suited to simulate the tracking behavior of Fresnel mirrors.
- The automatic sizing of the input scene aperture, i.e., the surface from which the sun rays are cast towards the concentrating system.
New in Tonatiuh 1.1.4 (Jan 22, 2011)
- It corrects some memory leaks and other minor bugs of the program and incorporates a large number of internal code improvements targeted to improve the program's speed in all platforms.
- This release is faster than previous releases of the program. Under Windows, it achieves a 22.4% reduction in the average time it needs to cast 6 million rays while simulating the optical behaviour of NREL's Solar Furnace in the three different computers in which the program was tested.
New in Tonatiuh 1.1.3 (Dec 18, 2010)
- It corrects a bug detected in the program's Update Manager of version 1.1.2, which precluded the Update Manger to fulfill its function.
- It introduces changes in the core of the Tonatiuh program that improves and simplified its structure.
- It adds two new shape plug-in to the list of standard Tonatiuh plug-ins: The trough and the surface of revolution versions of the standard non-imaging Trumpet-like concentrator
New in Tonatiuh 1.1.2 (Nov 19, 2010)
- It incorporates an Update Manager, which allows the users to check if there is available a newer version of the program than the one she or he is using, and to download it in case it is available.
- It adds a new shape plug-in to the list of Tonatiuh standard shape plug-ins. This new shape plug-in named "ShapeTroughCHC" allows the user to create trough-like Compound Hyperbolic Concentrators.
- It fixes the error associated with the lack of immediate response of a Tracker to user-induced changes in the transformation of its parent TShapeKit separator or in any of its ancestors.
- It fixed the error associated with the brief appearance of a ghost window when opening the Sun Position Calculator.
New in Tonatiuh 1.1.0 (Aug 6, 2010)
- Fixes some programming bugs that, when running Tonatiuh under the MAC OS X, resulted in the user not being able to maximize the program's main window, or in some plug-ins not being loaded.
- Improves the implementation of the ShapeFlatDisk so that now when using this shape as the starting surface from which to cast solar photons into the solar concentrating systems, the origin of the photons are much more uniformly distributed upon the flat disk surface that under the previous implementation of the plug-in.
- Includes two new shape plug-ins (ShapeSphericalRectangle, and ShapeBezierSurfaces).
- Includes one new sunshape plug-in (SunshapeBuie).