Release notes 2.54

📢 What's new

New features

Ground grading for BESS and other equipment

Following the addition of support for AC BESS, we’ve extended our grading capabilities. Now you can create flat surfaces — Grading Pads — to better assess grading volumes for installing batteries and other electrical devices, such as transformers and central inverters.
This way, anyone designing standalone BESS or hybrid PV + BESS systems can estimate grading volumes within a more integrated workflow.

How does it work? 

To mark the area you intend to flatten, you’ll need to create a closed boundary — the grading pad. In order to do so, after drawing a polyline within an existing PV area, you could either move it to the PVcase Grading Pads layer, or directly convert it via right-click action:

To perform the grading, you can keep using the Civil Analysis tool.

When you select a PV area that includes a Grading Pad, you’ll see two additional inputs.

• Embankment offset: defines the distance extending outward from the pad area. This offset serves as a transition zone between the flattened pad and the terrain surrounding it.
• Pads height above average: the pad is flattened based on the average elevation of its points. This parameter allows you to set the pad's graded level relative to this average.

Finally, when you click Grade, any pads will be flattened — and the overall grading volumes for the area will be reported in the summary. When using this tool, you can choose to grade individual frames, pads, or the whole area.

As volumes are reported for the whole area, if you wish to isolate the grading volume for the pads, it’s recommended to keep the pads in separate PV areas.

For this initial release, the resulting surface is flat and at constant elevation. We’re looking forward to your feedback, which will help us make the functionality more realistic and construction-ready.

Improvements

A new look for PVcase Ground Mount

As part of the PVcase rebranding, each of our products now has a new logo. You will see this new logo in the installer, AutoCAD ribbon, and throughout the PVcase Ground Mount interface.

As part of this update, we also changed our icons, for a more modern and fresher look!
Don’t worry though: all the tools you know and use have been kept in their exact spot in the ribbon.

Minor updates & bug fixes

Sort results in capacity iteration

In the Capacity Iteration tool, you’ll now be able to quickly sort the columns for quantitative values such as capacity, number of modules, and GCR.

Simply click the column header to toggle between ascending, descending, and no sorting order. You can also sort by multiple columns simultaneously.