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How to model a glass wall in Open Studio?

asked 2015-11-09 20:55:36 -0600

amoose's avatar

updated 2015-11-09 21:04:53 -0600

I am trying to model an atrium in Open Studio. Since it is not possible to set a window-to-wall ratio of 1 in Sketchup, I was told to specify the building material as glass in the Open Studio application. However, when I do this (in the Spaces --> Surfaces tab), the model fails because the Surface Type is still defined as a Wall. The only options I have for Surface Type are Floor, Wall, or RoofCeiling.

I have tried leaving the Construction Set for the surface in question as the default ExtWall, and specifying the material as glass. This fails; error being that glass is not an acceptable material for a Wall surface type. I have tried changing the Construction Set to ExtWindow, but this also fails as the surface type is still set to Wall.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

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Other things I have tried:

Creating a new Construction with a custom Material with properties of glass. However, this gives opposite thermal results to what I would expect when using the View Data measure (atrium is cooler than the rest of the building during the peak of summer).

Creating a new Construction with 'Theoretical Glass' as the material, picked from the list of default glazing window materials. This fails because I've used a non-wall material to define a wall.

amoose's avatar amoose  ( 2015-11-09 23:39:13 -0600 )edit

So, you're just trying to assign a glass construction to a Surface and not a Subsurface? Inferring in this link it seems to me that a window lives in a subsurface. What you describe I believe is skipping the create a subsurface part. Don't draw the window to the bottom of the Surface or it will become a door instead. Do the "offset" from point 3 under Subsurface section described in link. Or post if Jamie's clever suggestion works. :)

keb's avatar keb  ( 2015-11-10 08:23:28 -0600 )edit

Yup, this worked! Plus the link was very helpful just in general - thank you.

amoose's avatar amoose  ( 2015-11-10 16:41:13 -0600 )edit

@amoose, I made a new post in response to your offline question about using wwr on rest of building but the atrium.

David Goldwasser's avatar David Goldwasser  ( 2015-11-11 01:08:21 -0600 )edit

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answered 2015-11-10 07:47:53 -0600

Presumably there is some kind of frame material in this atrium? If you set that material as the wall material and set the WWR as the frame:glazing ratio that ought to work.

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This works too, thank you! As I also mentioned above, I ended up trying the method (which also works) of drawing a rectangle in each vertical exterior face of the atrium, and in my particular case offsetting the rectangle by 6" from each side of the surface. So it's something like a .99 WWR. Then 'project all loose geometry'. The last thing was once in OpenStudio, I did have to specify the construction for the horizontal ceiling portion (automatically denoted as a "Skylight"). I set this to ExtWindow; model ran great with results as expected.

amoose's avatar amoose  ( 2015-11-10 16:48:16 -0600 )edit

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Asked: 2015-11-09 20:55:36 -0600

Seen: 1,317 times

Last updated: Nov 10 '15