I wonder if someone has found a way to determine maximum yearly irradiance for a calulation mesh in Ladybug? Using Daysim/Honeybee and “Honeybee_Read All the Hourly Results from Annual Daylight Study” takes way too much time (minutes) and requires lots of disk space. The method does not have to be very exact and does not have to include more that direct solar radiation (even if it would be nice to also get an approximation of the diffuse radiation).
/Max
Aa I understand all these Hydra examples calculates solar energy (kWh/m2). I need the peek power (W/m2) to determine thermal comfort and solar shading.
I don’t know if this is currently possible with HB or not, but if you don’t mind roughing it out on the commandline, it is totally doable with Radiance. Use Gendaylit with the -02 option to create a climate based sky, and then use that sky to do a radiation analysis with ambient calculations turned off (i.e. a -ab 0 run).
Daysim approximates the position of the sun, which can be in as many as unique 3000 locations on an annual basis, to only 65 odd locations in the sky. GencumulativeSky, which is used for the cumulative studies in the Hydra examples, takes the annual radiation data and creates a Tregenza Sky pattern …. While a Tregenza pattern might be fine for an annual simulation, using it for hourly simulations isn’t going to be very accurate.
There are actually some thermal comfort examples on the Hydra website that you might find useful.