What's new in Tonatiuh 1.2.4
Jan 20, 2012
- The scripting capabilities have been increased to the point that in this new release of the program any operation and functionality available to the users via the Graphics User Interface is now also available via scripting.
- The resolution of a bug that produced the unexpected closing of the program when the user tries to cast rays before creating the concentrating geometry.
- The resolution of a bug associated with storing a given Tonatiuh "scene" under very particular and uncommon conditions.
New in Tonatiuh 1.2.3 (Dec 17, 2011)
- The option to specify the transmissivity of the media in which the concentrating system is immersed.
- An optimized ray generation algorithm, that analyzes the concentrating geometry as seen from the ray casting surface (usually a plane perpendicular to the main direction of the direct solar radiation) and determines the areas of the overall ray casting surface from which to actually cast rays.
- An improved version of the Buie's Sunshape plug-in.
- Updated Marble's maps that improve the selection of the plant location and the solar time by the user.
New in Tonatiuh 1.2.2 (Oct 3, 2011)
- Solves a series of minor bugs, as well as the following main bugs:
- The inappropriate sizing of the ray casting surface. In the previous release of Tonatiuh when the user modified the concentrating geometry, adding or substracting surfaces, the ray casting surface was not resized accordingly. This behavior has been corrected in the present release, so that the size of the ray casting surface is always adjusted to the concentrating geometry in order to increase the probabilities that the rays that are cast hit the concentrating geometry, decreasing the time needed to converge to accurate estimate of variables which are of interest to the user, such as the total power on target, the flux distribution in a given surface, etc.
- The erroneous generation of the seven-tuples of the photon map. In the previous release of the program, the field of the seven-tuple of a given photon that was associated with the side of the surface that the photon was hitting was incorrectly always set to -1, instead of setting it to 0 if the photon was hitting the rear side of the surface or to 1 if it was hitting the front side of the surface. This has been corrected in the present release of the program.
- The undesired possibility for the user of being able to associate a tracker to a TShapeKit. In the previous release of the program the user could select a TShapeKit and then include within it a Tracker element, with the operation resulting in a program crash, since Tracker elements are only intended to be use as child of TSeparatorKit elements. In the present release of the program, the program behavior has been modified to guarantee that the user can only associate a Tracker to a TSeparatorKit.
- The incapacity of the program to open Tonatiuh files containing TShapKit nodes that do not have associated a TShape node. In the previous release of the program, if the user closed a Tonatiuh session having defined a TShapeKit node without associating to it a valid TShape node as a child, the program was not able to subsequently open the given Tonatiuh file any more. The present release correct this.
- The crash of Tonatiuh when the user aborted the operation of creating a Bezier patches TShape node. In the previous release of the program, when a user was defining a Bezier patches TShape node, if she or he was in the process of entering the path to the data file containing the geometric information to create the Bezier patches and decided to abort that operation Tonatiuh crashed. The present release correct this error, and when the user aborts the entering of the geometry data filename, the program just do not create the Bezier patches TShape node.
New in Tonatiuh 1.1.4 (Jan 22, 2011)
- It corrects some memory leaks and other minor bugs of the program and incorporates a large number of internal code improvements targeted to improve the program's speed in all platforms.
New in Tonatiuh 1.1.3 (Dec 18, 2010)
- It corrects a bug detected in the program's Update Manager of version 1.1.2, which precluded the Update Manger to fulfill its function.
- It introduces changes in the core of the Tonatiuh program that improves and simplified its structure.
- It adds two new shape plug-in to the list of standard Tonatiuh plug-ins: The trough and the surface of revolution versions of the standard non-imaging Trumpet-like concentrator.
New in Tonatiuh 1.1.2 (Nov 19, 2010)
- It incorporates an Update Manager, which allows the users to check if there is available a newer version of the program than the one she or he is using, and to download it in case it is available.
- It adds a new shape plug-in to the list of Tonatiuh standard shape plug-ins. This new shape plug-in named "ShapeTroughCHC" allows the user to create trough-like Compound Hyperbolic Concentrators.
- It fixes the error associated with the lack of immediate response of a Tracker to user-induced changes in the transformation of its parent TShapeKit separator or in any of its ancestors.
- It fixed the error associated with the brief appearance of a ghost window when opening the Sun Position Calculator.
New in Tonatiuh 1.1.0 (Aug 6, 2010)
- This is a relatively major release of the program. It incorporates a signficant new feature to Tonatiuh: SCRIPTING.
- From now on, you will be able to automatize some of the recurrent taks that you do with Tonatiuh by writting your own scripts. This new release of the program introduces scpripting just as a proof of concept, we will be expanding the scripting capabilities of Tonatiuh in future program releases.
- In addition to scripting, this new release of the program, corrects several detected bugs, improves the general (circumsolar ratio) sunshape plugin, facilitates the storage of Tonatiuh results (photon maps), and makes it possible to inmediately open, within Tonatiuh, any Tonatiuh file just by cliking on the file -once the user associates, in the Operating System he or she is using, the Tonatiuh file extension with the Tonatiuh program.
New in Tonatiuh 1.0.1 (Jul 6, 2010)
- Fixes some programming bugs that, when running Tonatiuh under the MAC OS X, resulted in the user not being able to maximize the program's main window, or in some plug-ins not being loaded.
- Improves the implementation of the ShapeFlatDisk so that now when using this shape as the starting surface from which to cast solar photons into the solar concentrating systems, the origin of the photons are much more uniformly distributed upon the flat disk surface that under the previous implementation of the plug-in.
- Includes two new shape plug-ins (ShapeSphericalRectangle, and ShapeBezierSurfaces).
- Includes one new sunshape plug-in (SunshapeBuie).