Re: [EnergyPlus_Support] modelling a dome

On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 9:15 AM, Karen Walkerman <kwalkerman@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

To draw a dome that is appropriate for Open Studio, I would try the following (outside of any EnergyPlus Zone:

1. Select the circle tool. Before drawing anything enter the number of sides you want the circle to draw (look in the lower right hand corner, the current number of sides will be listed). 8 should be sufficient.

2. draw a dome following the directions here:

http://sketchup.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=39070

3. copy the outer face of the dome and move it away from any other geometry. This will give you a dome that has only one surface.

4. turn hidden geometry to "on" You will see that the dome is made up of a bunch of individual faces. I think that at this point you can copy and paste the dome into your energyplus zone.

5. One thing to think about is that I don't think that the energyplus geometry can recognize a face with a hole in it, so if you have a flat roof with a dome in the middle, you probably want to divide the roof into two sections, and then put the dome in the middle. My guess is that this is what is confusing OpenStudio and creating the dome 'window'

--
Karen

On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 8:35 AM, Andy Tindale <andy.tindale@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Coy,

I appreciate that you're trying to do this in OpenStudio but if you are unable to make further progress you could consider using a DesignBuilder evaluation just to generate the dome geometry (DesignBuilder has a built in dome block type). You may then be able to import the IDF generated by DB into OpenStudio if that is your preferred modelling environment.

Regards,

Andy Tindale
DesignBuilder Software ltd
www.designbuilder.com

-----Original Message-----
From: EnergyPlus_Support@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:EnergyPlus_Support@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Joe Huang
Sent: 18 February 2011 06:57
To: EnergyPlus_Support@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: coy_mllr
Subject: Re: [EnergyPlus_Support] modelling a dome

The title of your post caught my eye, because I worked on the same
problem, i.e., modeling a dome, nine years ago, although I was doing it
in DOE-2, rather than EnergyPlus.

As far as I know, all surfaces in any building energy simulation program
has to be planar, so I don't see how a pie slice would work,
unless it's automatically decomposed by OpenStudio into planar polygons.

What I did was to write an awk program that decomposes a hemispheric
dome with a given radius into a collection of polygons. It's written up
in an old DOE-2 User News article. See pp. 18-19 in

http://gundog.lbl.gov/dirun/23s_o_1.pdf

You would have to modify the program to output IDF instead of BDL,
but the fundamental math should still work.

Joe

Joe Huang
White Box Technologies, Inc.
346 Rheem Blvd., Suite 108D
Moraga CA 94556
(o) 925-388-0265
(c) 510-928-2683
yjhuang@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
www.whiteboxtechnologies.com
"Building energy simulations at your fingertips"

On 2/16/2011 1:05 PM, coy_mllr wrote:
> Hi, I am trying to model a large dome structure in energyplus using
> openstudio. Thus far, I have been unsuccessfull. It seems openstudio has
> issues identifying the dome surface as a roof. The program designates
> one -pie slice- of the dome as a wall. then, when I load the idf into EP
> launch and run an analysis, energyplus seems to register the -pie slice-
> as an opening. Is it possible to model a dome in e-plus using open
> studio? Any suggestions?
>
> Thank You!
>
> Coy
>
> CH2M Hill - intern
> OIT Renewable Energy Engineering - student
>
>

------------------------------------

Primary EnergyPlus support is found at:
http://energyplus.helpserve.com or send a message to energyplus-support@xxxxxxxx

The primary EnergyPlus web site is found at:
http://www.energyplus.gov

The group web site is:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EnergyPlus_Support/

Attachments are currently allowed but be mindful that not everyone has a high speed connection. Limit attachments to small files.

EnergyPlus Documentation is searchable. Open EPlusMainMenu.pdf under the Documentation link and press the "search" button.
Yahoo! Groups Links