Sub-hourly simulation for Linear Fresnel

Dear SAM Team,
we formatted a CSV weather file to run a simulation for Linear Fresnel in sub-hourly basis, like 15 minutes and 1 minute (as we were able to run such simulations for PTC and Power Tower). However, the program took each line in the file as an hourly value, so that we had only 91 "days" for 15 minutes simulation and six "days" for one minute simulations.

We exported the case for sdk and I could compare the ssc for PTC (where we were able to run correctly the simulation, using the same weather file) and for LFR and I noticed that in the ssc for LFR, the weather variables have a constraint of LENGTH=8760 that ssc for PTC does not have.

Is there any way to tun LFR models for sub-hourly data in the 2017.9.5 version ?

Thnks very much

Francisco Miller

Dear Francisco,

Of SAM's CSP models, we have only tested the Physical Trough model with subhourly simulations. Because the models were designed to run hourly simulations, they may not accurately model thermal transient effects at shorter time steps.

Simulations for the other CSP models may run at subhourly time steps, but the results are reported in hourly timesteps and can be misleading.

We are tracking this issue in the GitHub.com repository. Please see the description there and in the support forum conversations linked from that desciption:

github.com/NREL/ssc/issues/2

Best regards,
Paul.