Lixing,
Thanks for your concern
The main concern is designing an acceptable indoor environment is to maintain both Thermal Comfort and Indoor Air Quality requirements.
Concerning Indoor Air Quality requirements, a minimum ventilation rate (10l/s/person=1.29ACH) is required to maintain acceptable level of CO2 in an office space. A successful hybrid design should provide that ventilation rate by natural ventilation and switch to mechanical ventilation just when the minimum value couldn't be met.
At the same time, the zone operative temperature should lie within the upper & lower thermal comfort boundaries. A successful hybrid design should maintain natural ventilation as long as the zone operative temperature is within the comfort boundaries, once it reaches the upper comfort boundary temperature (cooling setpoint temperature CSP), the system should switch to mechanical cooling
In EnergyPlus, if I set the control mode to 1 (temperature) and the min. and max. outdoor temp. to 15C and 35C as in the example file, when the outdoor temp. reaches 32C and the indoor temp is 28C and the CSP is 26C , in that case the mechanical system should operate and the hybrid status should be equal to 2 but the hybrid status value is between 1 and 2. My explanation could be that since the outside lies between 15C and 35C, then hybrid control allows natural ventilation, and since the outdoor temp is higher than the indoor temp, then natural ventilation is not allowed.
Alternatively, if I set the control mode to 4 (Ventilation rate), the system just compare the predicted ventilation rate with the minimum value regardless to the cooling setpoint, therefore, during summer, the indoor temperature exceeds the upper comfort boundary temperature but with acceptable ventilation rate.
Could you please help me may be there is something I miss-understood?
Kind regards,
Sherif
From: Lixing Gu <gu@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: EnergyPlus_Support@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, May 6, 2009 2:24:48 PM
Subject: Re: [EnergyPlus_Support] Hybrid Ventilation Control
Sherif:
The existing EnergyPlus only allows one of controls at the same time. Any combination is not allowed. Could you provide your control in detail, so that possible enhancement will be considered?
Thanks.
Lixing
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, May 06, 2009 6:26 AM
Subject: [EnergyPlus_ Support] Hybrid Ventilation Control
Hi,
I'm trying to improve the performance of a hybrid ventilation scheme in an office space
I'm using EnergyPlus version 2.2
Concerning the control mode in the "Hybrid Ventilation control" model, we have to specify either to control natural and mechanical ventilation by temperature (control mode=1) or by ventilation rate (control mode=4)
Is there a way to combine these two control modes together and to let the program first to calculate the temperature (compare it with the acceptable temperature ranges) and the ventilation rate (compare it with the minimum ventilation rate) all together and then decide whether to provide natural or mechanical ventilation?
Thanks for your support
Kind regards,
Sherif