SciPost Submission Page
Solar Performance Optimization Code for the optical response of multilayer stacks in Python: SolPOC
by Antoine Grosjean, Pauline Bennet, Thalita Drumond, Amine Mahammou, Denis Langevin, Antoine Moreau, Audrey Soum-Glaude
Submission summary
| Ontological classification |
| Academic field: |
Physics |
| Specialties: |
- Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics - Experiment
|
| Approach: |
Computational |
Abstract
SolPOC, Solar Performance Optimization Code, is a simple and fast code running under Python 3.9. This package is designed to solve Maxwell's equations in multilayered thin film structures used in solar energy management systems. The code is specifically designed for research in coatings, thin film deposition, and materials for solar energy applications, like coatings for solar thermal, concentrated solar thermal, Concentrated Solar Power (CSP), photovoltaics (PV), low-e windows, buildings or even eyeglasses. The package includes a stable and fast method to calculate the spectral reflectivity, transmissivity, and absorptivity of a stack of thin films over the full solar spectrum and maximize the solar performance of the stack by optimizing its characteristics. SolPOC comes with several optimization methods, a script using multiprocessing pool tools, and a comprehensive database of refractive indices of real materials. The code has already produced major scientific advances in research on coatings for solar thermal systems and can easily be used in other domains, such as coatings for buildings, optics, human vision, etc. The code is simple to use for non-coder users, and automatically saves important results. The whole project is free and available on GitHub with complete documentations and tutorials.
