Horizontal surface selection and Evaporative Rate overwrite in IndoorLivingWall
Hi there experts!
I'm new to EnergyPlus and I'm trying to model evapotranspiration (ET) in a indoor farm. Found a handy measure "IndoorLivingWall" and want to see if I can adapt it.
1) The measure seems to work only for vertical walls, and if I were to select another horizontal surface like the floor, it gives an error. May I know if there is a work around on it? I imagine the code running behind does not take into consideration the orientation of the "wall".
2) Beside the two ET model, users are given the ability to overwrite the evapotranspiration calculation method with an EMS actuator. From the application note, the actuator name should be "Evapotranspiration rate". I created an EMS actuator with that name but it shows the following error signifying that the actuator was not recognised. How should I do it?
** Severe ** <root>[IndoorLivingWall][Space1-1IndoorLivingWall][evapotranspiration_calculation_method] - "<Evapotranspiration rate>" - Failed to match against any enum values.
3) Along the same line of question, how do I create and add my customised model into the list of available model to choose from?
Thank you all for your time and wisdom!
Kind regards
----------------- Update 19 Feb----------
1) Denis is right that while the source code does not differentiate between wall, roof or ground; Certain boundary conditions will raise error. Hence, I found a work around which is the create a floor plenum and select one of the surface as the wall where indoorlivingwall is situated. In reality, most of the plants are noy placed directly on the gound and one can just change the material of the plenum to their specification.
2) The steps to overwrite the evapotranspiration rate is attached as a image here.
3) To incorporate customised model into the E+, one would have to amend the source code directly, compile and build a customised local copy. A few things that the indoorlivingwall source code can improve on is to: a) In calculating the electricity power consumed, the LAI schedule should be taken into consideration such that when light is not turned on, the indoorlivingwall does not consume any electricity. b) Add two more inputs into the module, namely, (1) a LAI schedule because since LAI changes daily as the plant grows and (2) a Evapotranspiration Rate schedule calculated from external plant growth models. This is because as LAI changes, ET rate changes too. Then we can use the EMS system to apply this ET rate at each simulation timestep to overwrite the E+ inbuild model output. Overwriting ET rate using EMS actuator as shown in step 2 only introduce a fixed rate for the entire year.
What's a handful measure? The feature is included in EnergyPlus (see here & here). Perusing the source code, I don't see where surface type (wall vs floor) matters, yet other surface attributes may raise errors (e.g. boundary condition, Line 165).
See this story for example of comment 3.a) regarding fixing EnergyPlus source code for lighting schedule of indoor living wall.
@ShiweiNG it doesn't look like your image from 2) to show steps to overwrite the evapotranspiration rate attached correctly. You can please try again, or upload the image to Dropbox or a similar file sharing service and share a URL for the image?
Done, I have inserted a dropbox link. Thank you!