Wall thickness adjustment

asked 2018-06-08 13:08:57 -0600

lboskic
33 ●3

Hello,

I am trying to look at thermal mass effects from a building I have created in Sketchup and imported in Openstudio. I have my base model- created a building to my specific measurements, defined the loads I need, and all that. So I have data from a year simulation for that model.

Now, what is the part that I'm getting stuck on is changing the wall thickness. I tried going into Sketchup and creating a square building and tracing out the wall thickness I want and then extruding it to the building height (all within the energy plus zone). When this is done, I get the walls I want but in the space where I outlined the walls, I get an opening that Sketchup calls a glass opening and I can't change the top part to a roof, bottom part to a floor.

So then I tried doing some reading on wall thickness and essentially what I got is Energyplus treats walls as infinitely thin and the only thing that affects this is the material used in the exterior/interior wall (the material wall thickness). http://energyplus.helpserve.com/knowl...

Any ideas?

-Thanks

answered 2018-06-08 14:01:38 -0600

David Goldwasser

20405 ●94 ●14 http://www.openstudio.net/

The page you linked to provide a pretty good answer.

In EnergyPlus wall thickness only applies to heat transfer/thermal mass. Geometrically, all walls in EnergyPlus are infinitesimally thin - i.e. they have no thickness.

A surface has a construction assigned to it, and that construction is made up of one or more material layers. The materials generally do have a thickness which is used for heat transfer; there are exceptions like "NoMass" material which specifies thermal resistance without any thickness.

If you want to change the thickness for a surface, go to the Construction tab in the OpenStudio Application, instead of the SketchUp Plugin. Look at the materials listed for the construction and decide if you want to make one of those materials thicker or if you want to add an additional material to the construction. If you want to alter the thickness of an existing material, go to the Materials sub-tab, find the desired material, and alter the "Thickness" field. If you want to add a new material drag it from "My Model" or "Library" to the drop zone for the in the construction.

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Thank you for that. That is what I started doing in order to increase the thickness but just wasn't sure if other people have done it that way. Thanks again!