I haven't looked at the Slab preprocessor in detail, but it seems to me that your case can be handled if you are able to do the following:
(1) iterate between the preprocessor and EnergyPlus to converge on the average monthly indoor temperature
(2) model a sufficient amount of soil outside the slab or basement wall in EnergyPlus to handle the daily cycle of heat flows
and
(3) extract the soil temperature from the Slab preprocessor not at the slab/soil boundary, but at the above-defined (slab + soil)/soil boundary.
When I did ground heat transfer in DOE-2, I always included as much soil as allowed by the Response Factor calculation for this purpose (5.25 ft if the slab was modeled as a single layer, down to less than 2 ft if the slab was insulated).
The point is to let the Slab preprocessor handle the 2-D/3-D heat flows and those with time constants greater than a few days, and let EnergyPlus handle the quicker 1-D heat flows less than a few days.
All in all, though, I still think a coupled solution is the best way to go. I was under the impression that Neal Kruis is working to do that in EnergyPlus.
Joe
Joe Huang White Box Technologies, Inc. 346 Rheem Blvd., Suite 205A Moraga CA 94556 yjhuang@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://weather.whiteboxtechnologies.com for simulation-ready weather data (o) (925)388-0265 (c) (510)928-2683 "building energy simulations at your fingertips"
From my experience the one thing you will not find in the documentation is that the preprocessor works best when the space is always mechanically conditioned. I could not use it to calibrate a model of a space with no heating or cooling where the floor actually stored energy during the day and released it back to the space at night.
Ned Lyon, P.E. (MA, WV)
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From: EnergyPlus_Support@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:EnergyPlus_Support@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, March 22, 2016 7:49 PM
To: EnergyPlus_Support@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [EnergyPlus_Support] How the slab preprocessor works?
Hello everyone,
My goal is to find out how the slab preprocessor works and what degree of influence of their input data.
Is there any manual slab preprocessor about your simulation procedure or someone has some paper/example that can help me?
Thanks you all
Vanessa Caieiro
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Posted by: Joe Huang <yjhuang@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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