SolPOC: A Python Package for Modelling the Optical Coating Used in Solar Thermal Energy Systems
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.52825/solarpaces.v3i.2349Keywords:
Thin Layers, Modelling, Solar Energy, OpticsAbstract
Solar collectors of all types (thermal or photovoltaic, with or without concentration) require one or more surface treatments during their solar radiation conversion. These treatments are made up of thin layers of materials stacked that constitute mirrors, glass panes, thermal absorbers, or cover the junctions of PV cells. To allow all stakeholders in the solar community to easily model the optical behavior of their thin layer stacks we propose our in-house code. SolPOC (Solar Performances Optimization Code) is a Python Package specifically designed to provide a better understanding of coatings, thin film deposition of materials for solar energy applica-tions and especially for Solar Thermal Energy Systems. The package includes a stable and fast method to calculate the spectral reflectivity, transmissivity, and absorptivity of a stack of thin films over the full solar spectrum and maximize the solar performance of the stack by op-timizing its characteristics. SolPOC comes with several optimization methods, a script using multiprocessing pool tools, and a comprehensive database of refractive indices of real materi-als. The code has already produced major scientific advances in research on coatings for solar thermal systems. It is simple to use for non-coder users, automatically saves important results and is freely available on GitHub with a complete documentation and tutorials.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Antoine Grosjean, Pauline Bennet , Thalita Drumond, Amine Mahammou, Denis Langevin, Antoine Moreau, Audrey Soum-Glaude
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Accepted 2025-05-21
Published 2025-11-24
Funding data
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Agence Nationale de la Recherche
Grant numbers ANR-10-LABX-22-01-SOLSTICE;16-IDEX-0001 CAP 20-25