Dear Paul,
In general, we are moving toward making all of SAM's performance models flexible enough to handle sub-hourly simulations, and our work to convert the CSP models from TRNSYS to SSC will help with that effort. Part of the effort involves making SAM capable of reading subhourly weather data, and the other part involves developing algorithms that account for transient effects that come into play at shorter time steps but can be ignored at the hourly time step.
As I mentioned in my earlier reply, we have only tested the physical trough model at time steps less than 60 minutes, and we still consider that capability to be in the testing phase. It is possible in the current version of SAM to run the linear Fresnel model at smaller time steps if you have the appropriate weather data.
Best regards,
Paul.