Additional resources
Beginner's guide
The Solstice Absolute Beginner's Guide is designed to introduce enough concepts and functionalities that you will be able to autonomously use the Solstice program. The tutorial itself is provided in a pdf file while the Solstice resources on which it relies - i.e. input files - are available in a separate archive.
Downloads
Post-Processes
Solstice Post-Process is a collection of command-line tools that post-process the outputs of Solstice. These programs illustrate how the raw-results of Solstice can be processed with respect to the user needs.
They are free software written in standard C, without external dependency, and released under the GPLv3+ license. You can thus easily study, modify or extend them according to your needs. You are also welcome to redistribute them under certain conditions; refer to the license for details.
Installation
To use these tools, they must be built and installed from their source tree:
git clone https://gitlab.com/meso-star/solstice-pp.git
cd solstice-pp
make install
A description of each tools is given in the following sections.
solppraw
The solppraw program reads the Solstice outputs from a file or
the standard input whether a filename is provided as an argument or not,
respectively.
For each simulated sun direction, it formats the raw results in a human
readable text file, simplifying the analysis of the results.
The following example invokes Solstice to simulate two sun directions
and write the results in the output file that is then post-processed
by the solppraw tool.
solstice -D45,70:50,75 -R rcvs.yaml -o output input.yaml
solppraw output
Note that one can directly pipe the results of solstice to solppraw
without any intermediary output file.
solstice -D45,70:50,75 -R rcvs.yaml input.yaml | solppraw
solmaps
The solmaps command line takes as input the results of a
regular Solstice simulation.
These data are read from a file or from standard input whether a
filename is provided as an argument or not, respectively.
solmaps extracts the maps of incoming flux computed by Solstice
for the receivers whose per_primitive flag is enabled
(see solstice-receiver(5) for more
informations).
Each map is then saved in a specific
VTK
file.
The following example pipes solstice with solmaps to save the maps
of the receivers target_a and target_b computed by solstice for each
provided sun direction.
solstice -n10000 -D45,70:50,75 -R rcvs.yaml input.yaml | solmaps
solpaths
The solpaths tool reads the radiative paths dumped by Solstice when it
is invoked with the -p option.
The radiative paths are read from a file or from the standard input,
whether a filename is provided as an argument or not, respectively.
For each simulated sun direction, it generates a
VTK
file of the radiative paths.
The following example illustrates how solpaths is piped with
solstice to generate two VTK files, one per simulated sun direction.
solstice -n100 -D45,70:50,75 -R rcvs.yaml -p default input.yaml | solpaths
solpp
The solpp program takes two input files: the geometry of a
solar plant output by Solstice when it is invoked with the -g
option, and the results of a legacy Solstice simulation.
For each simulated sun direction, it writes three files.
The first one, is a
VTK
file that maps to the meshes of the primary geometries (i.e. the
reflectors) their associated simulation results; for instance their
respective cosine factor or the amount of flux that reaches a receiver
and comes from them.
The second output file, is another VTK file that stores the geometry of
the receivers and their simulation results as their incoming flux or
their efficiency.
Finally, the third file is an
OBJ file that stores the
meshes of the miscellaneous geometries, i.e. the geometries that are
neither receivers nor primary geometries.
These files can then be visualised and analysed in a data visualization
tool such as Paraview.
In the following example, solstice is invoked to simulate two
sun directions on the solar plant described in the input.yaml
file.
Then solstice run with the -g option to export the geometry of
this solar plant with respect to the aforementioned sun directions.
Finally solpp is invoked to post-process the previous outputs saved in
the simul and geom files.
solstice -D45,70:50,75 -R rcvs.yaml -o simul input.yaml
solstice -D45,70:50,75 -g format=obj -o geom input.yaml
solpp geom simul
