Designing with Bifacial panels in OpenSolar (OpenSolar 1.0)

To design with bifacial panels in OpenSolar, you will first need to ensure that the panels have the bifaciality parameters entered within the control zone 

You can check, or add these fields by going to control > design & hardware > modules > edit/create the bifacial panel you would like to design with > and enter   and 

• Bifaciality: This is the fractional amount of output that the rear side of the bifacial panel will provide when compared with the front. So if it only outputs 70% of the front then use the value of 0.7 here. Use a value of 0 for non-bifacial panels here.
• Transmission factor: This factor which describes how much light will transmit through the bifacial panel. Use a value of 0 for non-bifacial panels.

Once these bifacial fields have been entered, you are ready to design in studio. Within the studio zone, select the bifacial panel from the modules tab on the left toolbar. You can then design as normal using Solar Touch.

Note that raytracing is unavailable when designing with bifacial panels. If you would like to learn more about raytracing, please see this article. However, self-shading is available when using bifacial panels and designing with SAM (to learn how to change your output calculator to SAM, click here). This self-shade analysis will take into account the shading losses from the modules in the other rows of that panel group. 

When designing with bifacial panels, you will receive a pop-up message on the left toolbar to warn that you are using bifacial panels.

You will also be able to see the bifacial gains of the system by clicking  on the left toolbar, and then viewing the . You will see the bifacial gains figure under the Nominal POA (kWh) heading ()