Open studio spaces, constructions, thermal zones

asked 2018-11-11 22:49:20 -0600

re-measure

157 ●1 ●5 http://re-measure.com/

updated 2018-11-12 09:17:44 -0600

__AmirRoth__

4446 ●5 ●17 http://bleedinggreenna...

So, I mistakenly drew up my commercial building without having much forethought into thermal zones, and constructions. My questions are as follows:

1.a I've drawn up some really large spaces, and need to split them up into separate thermal zones. There are no barriers between the zones in terms of constructions (no walls between these zones), just different RTUs feeding certain areas of the building. Do I need to go into the SketchUp model and physically split the zones as shown in this example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWu_J... or is there another way to have multiple RTUs within one space.

1.b. Should the surfaces between these spaces (assuming I need to draw new spaces) have "air wall" surface constructions? Since there really isn't any physical walls between these zones (as described above), or is there another methodology to this?

2.a Since I really didn't pay much attention to constructions when building my spaces, I have an enormous amount of unspecified surface constructions, mostly interior walls (although most of them are labelled as exterior walls for some reason (see Q.3.a below). Is there any way I can enter these in without having to manually alter individual surfaces in OS -> spaces -> surfaces tab? For instance, all the interior walls will most likely have the same construction.

3.a A caveat to question 2 above. When creating additional spaces/zones using the youtube tutorial methodology listed above, the walls which should be interior walls, are labelled as exterior walls. Even after running "surface matching" in SketchUp as well as the BCL Surface Matching Measure, most of my interior walls, between spaces, are labelled as outdoor boundaries.

3.b Further to this, since I now have, for instance, 2 spaces with adjoining interior walls, there are technically 2 surfaces that are essentially one wall. Should I enter one of these walls as the actual surface construction and the other wall Adiabatic/AirWall?

edit retag flag offensive close merge delete

add a comment

answered 2018-11-12 01:12:47 -0600

mdahlhausen

9499 ●19 ●11 http://openstudio.net/

1a You need to go in an physically split your zones to have 1 RTU per zone.

1b Use the Air Wall construction and apply the Air Wall Zone Mixing measure to approximate air exchange between the zones

2a In OpenStudio constructions are inherited first from the surface, then space, then space type, then story, then building. If you want the same construction to apply to all interior walls, specify that in the default building construction on the facility tab. More detail here.

3a You interior walls should have adjacent surface boundary conditions. If you ran the surface matching script through the BCL measure and they still aren't matching, changes are there is a small gap between the spaces. Try running the geometry diagnostic script on your model to see if any issues show up.

3b Use the same construction for adjacent surfaces, otherwise you will get an error when you try to run the simulation.

Comments

So this "surface construction" detail is turning out be a HUGE problem! I can't find the "geometry diagnostic script" within the link. Next, I can't change the "outside boundary condition" to "surface" in OS -> Spaces -> Surfaces. It lets me change to anything other than "surface". The only workaround is to actually locate the adjoining wall (outside boundary condition object) for each surface, using the inspector in SketchUp, then change this field within the inspector. While I'm in the inspector, I allocate the construction, because I'm already there.

Am I missing something here???