We do not have a guide for adding inverters to the CEC library for SAM's "Inverter CEC Database" inverter model, mostly because we do not expect most people to have the test data to be able to do so.
If you do have the data for one or more inverters, you can add them to the CSV file that SAM reads. The file is in the
libraries folder of your SAM installation (
c:/SAM/2016.3.14 by default in Windows, see
here
for OS X), and is called
CEC inverters.csv.
Open the file in a spreadsheet program or text editor, and add data for your inverter(s) to the end of the file. You can use data from the other inverters in the file as an example. Note that in addition to data from the manufacturer's data sheet for the inverter, you will need the four empirically-determined coefficients (C0, C1, C2, and C3). Those parameters come from inverter testing, and are described in the documentation of the Sandia inverter model (
PDF 1.3 MB
). SAM reads the library file each time you start the software, so if SAM is running when you modify the library file, you'll have to restart it to see the new entries on SAM's inverter page.
If you only have data from a manufacturer's data sheet, and want to store inverter data for SAM's "Inverter Datasheet" model, you can use the
Save data to file and
Load data from file buttons on the Inverter page to save inverter parameters that you enter on the Inverter page to a text file. Those parameters are stored in an individual text file for each inverter rather than in a library. To see what that file format looks like, you can save the default parameters to a file, and then open it in a text editor. The format is a simple CSV format, so you could create a set of files outside of SAM.
Best regards,
Paul.
