Rapid Hillshade Analysis Method for Photovoltaic System Design by Contour Lines

For promotion of photovoltaic systems in hill areas, it is crucial to accurately analyze the shadow area throughout the year. Field measurement required a lot of manpower and time in the design stage. It is inefficient to directly use geometric formula for the results cannot be imported into the CAD software inconveniently. The shadow analysis tools of some software have low accuracy and lack the function of hill shade analysis in the target time period that is concerned in the design of photovoltaic systems. In this paper, a method of analyzing shadow area by using hill contour rasterization is proposed. This method supports user-defined calculation accuracy to meet different design requirements, and can be combined with AutoCAD in the form of plugin to achieve the purpose of aided design for photovoltaic plants in hill areas.