[Greenbuilding] PV Tracking ~ Fibonacci?

[Speireag Alden]

> Yes, and the panels would be arranged in an arc convex to the sun: the panel facing southeast is on the west side of the center (south facing), and the southwest panel is on the east side. That way, light bouncing off one panel should hit its neighbor.

	Within limits, yes.  Take it too far, and you will induce shading of the center by the wings.

	You could, however, detach the wings slightly and set them further back, spacing them away from the center, to minimize shading.  Within limits.

	Reuben's find of the peer-review-type argument is important, though.  I did not have the time to get into the results or think deeply about it, but I did notice that some of the panels on Aidan's tree were facing northward, and it seemed to me that there was room for optimization, there.  I do not know enough about electrical matters to have spotted the open circuit voltage problem.

	It's often wise to try to figure out why something happens in a given way in nature, especially in arenas where small optimizations through many generations are possible, because clearly natural selection is extremely likely to favor the better design, given enough generations.  However, leaf and branch orientation are almost certainly not selecting entirely for maximizing solar input.  For instance, as anyone who has gotten good at felling large trees will tell you, it's easy to underestimate how much a branch can change the center of mass of a tree, and therefore its resistance to death by wind or snow-load.  It may well be that for the tree as an organism, simple mechanical balance is sufficiently important that it outweighs (heh) the incremental advantage to only having a canopy on the sun-facing side(s), especially for deciduous trees in northern climates, where long days and shallow solar paths produce solar input from a very wide angle across the course of a day.

	We, on the other hand, can engineer our frames and optimize for solar input to the exclusion of all else, if we want to.  We can cut the competition down, rather than having to out-grow it and get above it.  So we and trees have different design constraints.

-Speireag.



--
...the inevitable problem with all attempts to portray trans women as "fake" females [is that] they require one to give different names, meanings, and values to the same behaviors depending on whether the person in question was born with a female or male body (or whether they are perceived to be a woman or a man). In other words, they require one to be sexist.
--Julia Serano