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OpenStudio Results for EnergyPlus

asked 2018-05-02 10:59:12 -0500

Tim Johnson's avatar

updated 2018-05-02 11:16:53 -0500

I have a project with a water source VRF system that required me to move into EnergyPlus for the proposed model while the baseline models are done entirely in OpenStudio. OpenStudio has some nicely formatted reports that come in handy when submitting to reviewers and it would be nice to have baseline and proposed models in the same reporting format.

Is there a way to run some of the OpenStudio reporting measures on EnergyPlus model outputs? It is my understanding that these measures use the EnergyPlus output data anyway, is that correct?

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answered 2018-05-03 02:13:44 -0500

TL;DR: not the OpenStudio Results measure, no


A Reporting Measure, such as OpenStudio Results, does things at two different points in time. If you consider the following logic to go from an OpenStudio Model (.osm) to your .html file.

OSM ------ Forward Translation ---[1]---> IDF ----- Simulation -------> Results (.sql) ---[2]--- Reporting---> Reports (.html)

At [1]: it runs code on your forward translated IDF file (after E+ pre-processor really, omitted for clarity), the idea is mostly to create Output:Variable and Output:Meters, etc: anything needed for the appropriate results needed by your Reporting Measure to be available in your SQL file post-simulation.

At [2]: it first runs code to associate the model (OSM) to the results database (SQL), then it basically computes some values etc from a mix and match between what's available in the model directly versus direct SQL queries. Ultimately the ruby variables that store these values is passed on to an ERB (Embedded Ruby) template: you fill the placeholders in that "special HTML" (ERB) file to produce the HTML.

All that to say that in general, you should very well be able to run a Reporting Measure on an .idf, at least via a similar method that is used in measure testing where you would explicitly call the two separate methods (energyplusOutputRequest [1] and run [2]).

In the case of the OpenStudio Results measure though: a lot of the code used to produce summaries for Spacetypes for example is actually explicitly querying the OpenStudio Model, which in your case doesn't exist, so a lot of sections wouldn't work (the concept of SpaceType doesn't exist in EnergyPlus...). Worst, because the measure expects the OSM to be loaded successfully, the measure will just crash, period.

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Thanks @Julien Marrec. Due to my limited knowledge of Ruby, I think I will make the E+ reports work for now.

Tim Johnson's avatar Tim Johnson  ( 2018-05-03 09:12:09 -0500 )edit

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Asked: 2018-05-02 10:59:12 -0500

Seen: 443 times

Last updated: May 03 '18