Rough Terrain & Horizontal Single Axis Trackers

finding the optimum graded surface for any given tracker is a highly complex problem, which involves multiple linear and non-linear variables plus thousands of possible solutions.

Bulldozer, the grading automation tool developed by Geo Future helps our Clients determine which trackers offer the best cost to benefit ratio; beyond just helping to find the optimum surfaces (preliminary grading), but; also providing data to identify the existing trade-off between earth work vs. steel costs; which depending on the market, may be very different from one place to another.

We are proud to share with you a sneak peek of a white paper that was recently released by EPRI; for which we were invited to collaborate by Dr. Doug Hall with Hall Consulting. Our work we believe is a step in the right direction, this is a very complex matter with many parameters and and far reaching impacts, direct and indirect, to the LCOE.

We invite you to connect with EPRI so you could have access to the complete study.

how does bulldozer works

Bulldozer use pile lengths as a variable, together with tracker’s grading specifications. Once the tracker layout - any tracker in the market - and the file with the topography are uploaded, Bulldozer runs thousands of permutations, in 10 seconds or less. The output is a table with the optimum cut and fill quantities for any project size, organizing results by tracker row, by sub array, by array or by any configuration the Client may had specified.

Once the Client identify the best configuration, the function that produces a contour map as an output is manually enabled by the user and start running. This process could take 5 minutes or more, its output is a geo-referenced 3D AutoCAD file with the contours for the proposed preliminary grading plan, including a table with the cut and fill quantities.

Please feel free to contact us if you are interested in learning more about our Tracker Topography Constraint Analysis (TTCA) using Geo Future’s Bulldozer tool, for any tracker project in any place in the world; call us at +1 415 793 9156.