RE: [EnergyPlus_Support] Should I model the plenum?

["Mahabir Bhandari" <bhandari@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Kir,

 

You can use DesignBuilder for modeling your building including the plenum
fairly quick. DesignBuilder lets you export the idf file which you can
modify if needed.

 

Full functional 30 days trial version can be downloaded from:

 

http://www.designbuildersoftware.com/designbuilder.php

 

Mahabir

 

  _____  

From: Michael J. Witte [mailto:mjwitte@xxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Friday, September 01, 2006 5:25 PM
To: EnergyPlus_Support@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [EnergyPlus_Support] Should I model the plenum?

 

Should you model plenums? It depends largely on the specific goals of the 
analysis. 

If you decide to ignore the plenums, you must make the conditioned zones
tall 
enough to include the plenum height so that the total area of exterior wall
is 
accounted for. 

If you choose to model the plenums, then the plenum is modeled as a thermal 
zone. 

With EP-Quick it may be possible to create two buildings - one that is 7 
stories with a floor-to-floor height of the conditioned space only, and then

another which is 7 stories with a floor-to-floor height of the plenum space 
only, and then mix the two together. All of the surface coordinates should
be 
OK except for the z values which could be easily modified to stack thing up 
correctly. Note that the plenum floors will come out of EP-Quick as multiple

zones, but these can be combined into a single zone simply be reassigning
the 
interior environment for the plenum surfaces and deleting the extra interior

surfaces that would be created in the plenum. Well, it may not be a real 
simple task, but it is doable.

Mike

On 1 Sep 2006 at 21:25, kir kumar wrote:

> Dear Mike,
> I have got a huge building with 7 floors, each floor is having a plenum.
> All the return air from the zones enters the plenum before entering the
air
> handling unit in the mechanical room and this happens for every floor. One
> side of the air handling unit sucks the return air from the plenum and
sends
> fresh air from its other end into the supply duct as supply air to the
> zones.
> My questions are 
> 1. Should I model plenum as a separate zone?( I am actually using ep quick
> to build my zones but unfortunately ep-quick does not have the capability
of
> building plenums)
> 2. Should I just ignore the plenum and treat it as return air duct which
> carries return air from zones to the air handler in mechanical room?
> 
> Can any one help me with those questions?
> thanks in advance,
> kiran
> 
> 
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========================================================
Michael J. Witte, GARD Analytics, Inc.
EnergyPlus Testing and Support 
EnergyPlus-Support@ <mailto:EnergyPlus-Support%40gard.com> gard.com

 



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