Hi Alfred,
As you note, for the industrial process heat parabolic trough model, it is not possible to specify the aperture area as an input.To model your particular system, you will need enough information to specify the parameters on the Solar Field, Collectors, and Receivers page so that the solar multiple you specify results in an aperture area that matches that of the actual system.
As Angus mentioned above, you can use SAM's code generator to create MATLAB code that sets the value of SAM inputs by interacting with SAM's application programming interface (API). For more about that see the
SDK page
. However, that approach does not make it possible to modify internal calculations of the model.
Best regards,
Paul.