Creating new Building Programs and Zone Programs for New Zealand context

Hi all,

I'm a Masters of Building Science student at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, focusing my thesis on creating a means to assess thermal and daylight performance of office buildings within early stages of design and provide meaningful feedback. Honeybee and ladybug are excellent tools for this!

I would love to create a template in honeybee and ladybug which allows the architect or engineer to load in their geometry to the brep of multiple breps, choose their climate from the list of New Zealand climates, and run an energy and daylight iterative simulation method. The outputs would then be read by a component that would do a sensitivity and uncertainty analysis on the data of all the parametric simulations and provide a range of parameters which the architect and engineer stay within (a limited slider if you will) of highlighted parameters which would be the most sensitive to change. Sensitivity would be defined by how much of an impact the change would make on thermal and daylight comfort (comfort defined by adaptive thermal comfort here in New Zealand and standard daylight comfort for office workers).

My question to the forums is this:

Firstly, is there already a component within grasshopper or honeybee/ladybug which does this?

Secondly, as the construction standards, schedules and loads are different here in NZ, how am I able to create my own Building Program and Zone program to add to the library of programs in honeybee?

Thirdly, is there a way to create a schedule in a less "list-y" way. My problem in making schedules as just a string of 8,760 numbers is that it becomes complicated if you insert holidays into this schedule. EnergyPlus has a feature where you define the holiday periods that overwrite the schedules for those specific days - does honeybee have this feature, or would you need to just continue to use native Grasshopper components to do this overwriting?

Sorry for the long post, hope to hear from you all

- Elly

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Chris Mackey on August 1, 2015 at 10:15am

Elly,

The project sounds cool and you can absolutely build a GH definition to do what you are asking (perhaps with the addition of a python component of your own).

We currently have no component that does sensitivity analysis on a bunch of simulations but I imagine that you can easily write one if you know/learn a bit of python (mathematical calculations like that are how I started learning python myself a couple of years ago and are fairly easy to set up after watching an online python series like this awesome one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBxCHonP6Ro&list=PL6gx4Cwl9DGAc...).

Our current building programs come from the OpenStudio library. I would really recommend using this and editing your HBzones with components to meet New Zealand standards but, if you are really ambitious and have a good deal of time on your hands, you can try to edit the OpenStudio libraries themselves (by editing the OpenStudioMasterTemplate.idf file in your Ladybug default folder). You might also have to edit some of the code in Honeybee_Honeybee depending on how much you want to change with the building programs (just changing the values or adding some new things should not change too much). Instead of editing the constructions of the OpenStudio Library, I would just add the constructions you want to the userCustomEPLibrary.idf file in your Ladybug default folder and they will appear whenever you use Honeybee.

I have not tried this yet but I beleive that the schedules that you create with the "Honeybee_Daysim Occupancy Generator" can be plugged into an E+ simulation (this is less-listy). If it does not work, it should just take a few minor tweaks of the component code to get it to do that. Let me know if you end up trying it.

-Chris

Permalink Reply by Chris Mackey on August 3, 2015 at 7:43am

In case other users end up seeing this conversation, I just wanted to clarify that all new schedules and constructions should be written into the userCustomLibrary.idf as mentioned in this post:

http://www.grasshopper3d.com/group/ladybug/forum/topic/show?id=2985...

There is not much of a need to edit the OpenStudioMasterTemplate.idf as most of the needed functionality is in the userCustomLibrary.idf.

-Chris

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