Hi. I designing a HVAC system for university classrooms. I would like to know if it will be a good idea to use Openstudio to calculate heating and cooling loads and some other calculations. I have been using Trace700 but it is quite boring.
Any advise will be appreciated.
Thanks
@obuchely, I interpret your primary question to be: "In addition to annual energy simulation, can I use EnergyPlus for load calculation and equipment sizing?" The answer to that is yes, EnergyPlus supports this use case. In fact, Trane's TRACE team is working with the EnergyPlus development team on improving the sizing routines—in a non-Trane specific way, of course. There are already some interfaces that use EnergyPlus in this capacity--one example is Sefaira Systems. As for whether OpenStudio is less "boring" than TRACE, well that's a matter of taste. :)
Thanks. I did my calculations in both softwars, I found some interesting differences in the results. One of my thermal zones has 3 times more cooling load in trace than OS. I compared the zone component load summary and found that the fenestration solar is more than twice in Trace. I dont know if energy plus is taking in to account the shading from the same building and trace dont. There is one window in the thermal zone and you can see it will get shading from adjacent walls. (I exported the gbXML to trace, used same U values, SHGC people etc.) I might post a question about this.
There is a paper from SimBuild 2010 comparing Trace, IES VE, EnergyPlus and eQuest for cooling load calculations. Solar Gain and Cooling Load Comparison Using Energy Modeling Software
absolutely. In addition, if you use a measure based solution, you could leverage the analysis capability of OS-Server and easily do a multi-objective optimization problem balancing heating and cooling loads as can be seen in the attached image.
There are some resources available in the spreadsheet link above, but feel free to ask some specific questions as well.
Asked: 2015-07-19 17:15:51 -0500
Seen: 583 times
Last updated: Jul 20 '15
@obuchely I removed your "design" tag. In the future please try to use existing tags and if it's necessary to create a new one, choose one that is not too general (like "design", or "modeling") but also not too specific. Thanks for helping to keep the site organized.