Terrain and Piles

The terrain and piles panel is where you can update your pile information by placing your equipment on terrain, run grading, set solar arrays as undulating or rigid, and adjust your pile sizes. 

Selected Area

• Boundary- If you select this option you can determine what is being updated by boundary. You can either select from list or from scene, if nothing is selected the default is that all boundaries will be selected.
  • Much like when you are generating a layout, if a boundary is made an exclusion zone and it's selected, it will be excluded from grading.
• Equipment- If you select this option you can determine what is being updated by individual equipment. You can either select from list or from scene, if nothing is selected the default is that all equipment will be selected.
  • This includes all equipment and roads.

Terrain

• This is where you can see your terrain file, if there are multiple terrain files in the project you can toggle between them.
  • If you aren't sure which one is which, the icon to the right will focus on it in the scene.
  • You can see if cut and fill has been applied to your scene already, you can clear it out by clicking on the trash can where you will get the option to clean within a selected area or clean all.

Cut-Fill

• This section can be toggled on and off depending on if you want to run grading or not. If you are just adjusting solar array limits or placing equipment on terrain this should be toggled off.
• North Terrain Slope- This is where you can set a maximum north slope
• South Terrain Slope- This is where you can set a maximum south slope
• E/W Terrain Slope- This is where you can set a maximum east/west slope
• Tolerance/Grading Window- determines the smoothness of the graded surface and how much it undulates from positive to negative.
  
  
• Net Balance- The balance of cut and fill after grading is run
  
  • If "Auto" is selected the system will aim for 0 (or as close to 0 as possible)
  • If "Set" is selected you can determine which way grading will skew, for example if the net balance is set as a negative number it will skew towards more cut  and vice-versa.
• Cut-Fill Grid Size- This is set at a standard 24ft, for more information click on the i icon.
• Calculation Precision- This can be toggled between: Draft, Medium, and Maximum
  
  • Toggling this will affect processing times
    
    

Solar Arrays Limits

• Slope Along Axis- This is the maximum allowable slope of an array
• Slope Change, Bay to Bay- This is for terrain following trackers, it dictates how much the tracker slope can change from pile to pile.
  • In the case of a rigid tracker you will leave this as 0%.
• Cumulative- This is also for terrain following trackers, it dictates how much the tracker slope can change cumulatively.
  
  • In the case of a rigid tracker you will leave this as 0%.
  • If the manufacturer doesn't specify a max cumulative slope you can set it at 100%
• End-to-End Vertical Exposure- This defines the vertical distance between tracker edges during Cut-Fill.  
  • if your racking manufacturer doesn't have a limit you can leave it as "Not Limited".

Piles

• Embedment- dictates how far piles can be under ground level.
• Reveal- dictates a minimum and maximum amount of pile allowed from ground level to solar panels.