Insulated night shutters

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by yj on December 10, 2014 at 11:28pm

hi Mostapha and Chris, I just had to jump into this conversation about natural ventilation. I have been trying to look into different ways to model heat transfer - like Cfdesign that went through acquisition into autodesk simulation package and some catia plugins that I cant afford. and what you two talk about sounds like music to my ears. The closest thing I know is ambiens by Tas suite, which got covered by Lmnts. below you see an image of my design it is based off your work - ladybug radiation analysis. right now its more ore less an artistic illustration, esp the wind part shown as arrows. I am designing an advanced facade system that integrate louvers, solar chimneys and natural ventilation. identifying development application is one thing but withouth enough climate data sets that might also be an animatable parameter using native grasshopper components.

Permalink Reply by Mostapha Sadeghipour Roudsari on December 15, 2014 at 10:28pm

Hi Youngjae,

All sounds fair. We need to have a CFD component in the package and we tried once. I teamed up with EFRI-Pulse project (http://www.buildsci.us/efri-pulse.html) while ago and developed a connection to OpenFoam. We made a prototype that is works but the project is on hold for reasons which are out of my hand and I am the most frustrated person not having it out for use. Search for "Butterfly" and you will find some related stuff.

There are also other cases that may happen soon. Years ago, I wrote a connection to Ansys Fluent which I will share with Cayote project (http://www.grasshopper3d.com/group/coyote). Ansys Fluent is pretty expensive though and I personally never had the chance to use it once I left the school!

Other option is CoolVent (http://coolvent.mit.edu/), and we briefly had some conversations on getting it connected to the package but we already have so much on the list before getting there.

Mostapha

Permalink Reply by yj on December 16, 2014 at 2:55am

@Artem - didn't mean to make a tangent too far off from your topic, just wanted to reply to Mostapha briefly.

I did read about your post on butterfly. butterfly is cfd and coolvent is thermal zone as I understand.

I think honeybee and ladybug together are already a great design tool. I didn't realize the whole story with CFD and the various ways you have tried. Have a lot of respect for your project and your colleagues that are working on this, and I hope you guys get enough credit just going for it considering just how ambitious your project is. and open-source equivalence of at least 7 percent equity share too :) as in per owners. if you guys can offer 1 year cliff and 4 year vesting I will consider joining your team. just kidding what your team is doing are beyond me.

After checking simulation CFD 2015, I realized that one big advantage for LB+HB is that well, I didnt see a built in feature of taking account for direct solar gain as part of the simulation.

From the tutorials I have seen, they set the reference temperature to the exterior walls, but there is nothing solar. Here is a rather comprehensive video of how to set up for Simulation CFD . From 10:30 you can see that boundary condition for exterior walls is set with a film coefficient and Reference temperature (around 12:30). At 12:33, there is actually a parameter called radiation right below. I check the parameters for that myself and found that it includes emissivity and reference temperature but not watt hour per square meter like we have it with ladybug. 

SO even for a software like simulation CFD, which already seems very sophisticated with the pay-as-you-go cloud parallel simulation option and all, I don't see that it is designed for simulating natural ventilation. Since with SIM CFD it seems that one can be precise about everything including heat plumes from artificial lights in terms of watts so I am guessing that there is a way to model in solar gain as some kind of projected geometry somehow but it is pretty clear that there is EXTRA WORK needed to factor in solar gain there.

I think it would be pretty major if there is a way to model solar radiation and CFD for interior/building envelop together because I have not seen that kind of simulation in the industry.

Thank you for the extra ref cayote and coolvent. I will make check them out along with SAM.

p.s. I reread what I wrote and just wanted clearify I sure didn't refer to any of your work with honeybee or ladybug as "artistic illustration." I meant my pretty arrows :)

Permalink Reply by Mostapha Sadeghipour Roudsari on December 23, 2014 at 10:57pm

"I did read about your post on butterfly. butterfly is cfd and coolvent is thermal zone as I understand."

That's true.

"After checking simulation CFD 2015, I realized that one big advantage for LB+HB is that well, I didnt see a built in feature of taking account for direct solar gain as part of the simulation."

This is actually part of the process in Butterfly. Here is the conceptual workflow:

There are technical issues involved though if you want to consider the effects of long-wave radiation from the surfaces which is something that EFRI-Pulse project is trying to address.

"p.s. I reread what I wrote and just wanted clearify I sure didn't refer to any of your work with honeybee or ladybug as "artistic illustration." I meant my pretty arrows :)"

No worries! I personally consider data visualization as one of the most important parts of the development and I'm a big fan of meaningful and beautiful graphs and arrows. If you are looking for a great talk on visualizing algorithms then you should check this one: http://bost.ocks.org/mike/algorithms/, http://vimeo.com/112319901

Mostapha

Permalink Reply by Theodoros Galanos on April 29, 2015 at 9:39pm

I'm crossing all my fingers for collaboration to OpenFoam.

Let me know if it moves forward and how I can assist.

Permalink Reply by Artem Polomanyy on December 12, 2014 at 5:29am

Thanks and a lot of respect for your prompt help.

Before you fixed the "schedules node" I had to open the bloody input/output reference pdf which i found really easy to apply and fix the schedules manually.

Now when I see how short and easy are the codes I want to propose you a wish list of "AA SED programme" so that later students would be able to use your honeybee tool more intensively.

First of all, I want to clarify, what are the pressures when we specify the infiltration. That was still unclear for me as a beginner. Is it m3/m2s at 50Pa or at actual Pascal? If it is at actual Pascal, does that mean we should specify the concext somehow by the input of coefficients or by the actual bRep context or input it from some CFD? What do we do? What do you typically do?

Secondly, I found an idf example which works with material substitution in energy plus example folders. I think this is something what Chris was trying to propose. The code seems short. Can we expect that this feature of material replacement according to the schedule would appear later?

Other passive elements like trombe wall for instance would be appreciated as well. 

I see you are now focused more on high/light tech tools, but don't forget about low tech vernacular strategies.

Many thanks again.

Permalink Reply by Mostapha Sadeghipour Roudsari on December 15, 2014 at 10:49pm

Hi Artem, Thank you so much for the feedback. I really appreciate it.

1. I'm not sure but if you are talking about pressure coefficient for a window then, the best way is to use CFD simulation and consider the context. That's exactly one of the shortcomings that EFRI-Pulse project is trying to address by getting CFD simulation integrated to energy simulation.

2. Can you give me more information about this example? If you are looking for default construction set based on building program, you can create it yourself in Honeybee. In general material (or to be more technically accurate constructions) are assigned based on standards and climate.

3. This is a great point. We are all for applying passive strategies. The issue is that EnergyPlus is not designed originally for simulating passive strategies. It is always so much extra work to develop components for modeling passive design ideas. Even modeling something like an Atrium is not that easy. I posted a question about it few months ago and as you can see people are doing it in really different ways (https://unmethours.com/question/42/what-is-the-best-practice-to-mod...). I have my own approach for personal projects but once I want to apply it to Honeybee, I need to make sure we are implementing it right. It is similar for natural ventilation, green houses, double walls, etc.

The good news is that we found a really good consultant to help us with natural ventilation and Chris is implementing it to Honeybee. We are closely working with OpenStudio team and other experts on the field to find the best solutions to implement modeling passive strategies and I hope to get them in ASAP. Once we have them set I can say Honeybee can be used as a design tool. I know that we are not there yet!

Thanks again and looking forward for more comments and wishes.

Cheers,

Mostapha

Permalink Reply by Artem Polomanyy on December 16, 2014 at 4:18am

Hi Mostapha!

 I meant the following tiny bit of code

SurfaceControl:MovableInsulation,
Inside, !- Insulation Type
exteriorWall, !- Surface Name
Nightshutters, !- Material Name
shuttersUse; !- Schedule Name

This code is neccesary for cold climates where one would wish to conserve daily gains during the night.

Permalink Reply by Chris Mackey on December 20, 2014 at 8:27am

Artem,

That E+ object seems like something that we should implement.  I have been struggling a bit recently to find the best way to implement control objects for a few constructions like the surface control you mention and the blinds control discussed here:

http://www.grasshopper3d.com/group/ladybug/forum/topics/midpane-bli...

I see this as something that I will need for my work this upcoming semester and so I can tell you that I will implement it within 3 months if no one else does sooner.

First on my agenda is a set of natural ventilation objects, though, which also seem to be in demand by a lot of people on this thread.

I second your call for focusing on passive strategies.  I feel that the energy modeling community these days is undergoing something similar to that which happened to the aerospace industry over the last couple of decades.  Namely, where all of these crazy innovative technologies were created with the aim of space exploration and yet most significant impacts that the industry has created have been in terms of satellite images and communications around Earth.  Similarly, many innovative energy modelling technologies have been created with the aim of enabling digitally-controlled smart walls and vacuum insulated structures and yet the most widespread impacts have tended to be in terms of assessment of passive design strategies.  The ways in which technologies are sold during development versus how they used in applications are interesting.

-Chris

Permalink Reply by Abraham Yezioro on December 17, 2014 at 12:26am

Hi Chris,

I'm checking the Example of Shade Benefit file you uploaded above. It runs fine. I updated all the components and there is an issue with the HB_EnergyShadeBenefit. It complains about (red component):

1. Solution exception:Local variable 'legendFontSize' referenced before assignment.

Then i connected the LB_LegendPar to see if it can solve the situation. Then i get (orange component):

1. The calculation has been terminated by the user!

For now i pasted the "old" component and it is working, but ... just to let you know.

Thanks,

-A.

Permalink Reply by Chris Mackey on December 20, 2014 at 11:08am

Gosh there are a lot of topics on this thread.  Thank you for letting me know, Abraham, and I have just fixed the bug.  You can find the working component on the github and in the attached file.

Attachments:

• Energy Shade Benefit Evaluation_12_20_2014.gh, 518 KB

Permalink Reply by Abraham Yezioro on December 20, 2014 at 1:26pm

Great.

Thanks!

-A.

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