[esp-r] release of ESP-r version 11.5

[Ian Beausoleil-Morrison]

Dear ESP-r users and developers,

Version 11.5 of the ESP-r system is now available.  A summary of the changes
and new features included in this release is given at the bottom of this
e-mail.

The source code may be accessed via the ESP-r Central Subversion repository.
To do this, you must first install a Subversion client on your system.  Free
clients are available at http://subversion.tigris.org/project_packages.html.

Once you have installed the Subversion client you can download the source
code for version 11.5 of ESP-r anonymously using the following command:
	svn checkout https://esp-r.net/espr/esp-r/trunk
	OR
	svn checkout http://esp-r.net/espr/esp-r/trunk

If you already downloaded the source code of a previous version with the
above command, then you do not have to do a full download of version 11.5.
Rather, you can update the source code by executing the following command
from your "trunk" directory:
	svn update

(ESP-r developers who wish to make source code contributions to ESP-r should
contact Alex Ferguson at afersugo at nrcan.gc.ca who can configure an account
for you on ESP-r Central.  Further information on ESP-r Central for
developers is available on the ESRU web site.)

ESP-r source code is available exclusively through ESP-r Central.  However,
ESRU will continue to produce and post pre-compiled versions for specific
operating environments on its web site.  These binary versions will
generally be made available within a few days of a source code release and
will be announced to this e-mail list.  Release notes will also continue to
be posted on the ESRU web site.

Regards,
- Ian

Ian Beausoleil-Morrison
ESP-r Archivist on behalf of the ESP-r development team
Carleton University
Ottawa, Canada


Release Notes
11.5 (May 2008)
===============

Simulator
---------
- A new computational engine has been developed for the ish module
  to enable obstruction blocks to cross the plane of a zone surface.
- New functionality has been added to ish and bps to calculate
  diffuse shading.
- ish bugs relating to non-south facing inclined surfaces have
  been addressed.
- An error in the calculation of sun position unit vector x, y, z
coordinates
  was corrected.  This only affects radiance calculations when conducted
  silently and when a daylight coefficient casual gains control is assinged
  in the model.
- A number of options have been added for the calculation of sky
temperatures
  for longwave radiation exchange from external surfaces.  These can
  be invoked through a simulation toggle.
- A bug in the WATSUN-PV special material model has been corrected.
  This bug could, in some situations, predict an electrical production
  at night.
- A bug in the 2-node plant radiator model (type 21) has been corrected.
  Previously, the model incorrectly computed the heat transfer from the
  radiator when no water flowed through the radiator.
- A simplified PI room controller has been added that is specially
  adapted to room control of wet central heating (WCH) systems.
- An outside temperature compensation controller has been added for
  WCH systems.
- The functionality of the generic TRNSYS "wrapper" has been expanded
  and a number of bugs have been corrected to enable the use of multiple
  TRNSYS TYPE's within an ESP-r plant network.


Project Manager
---------------
- Additional functionality has been added in preparation for demonstrating
  compliance with the UK building regulations.
- Heating and cooling setpoints for zone controls can now be imported
  from temporal files.
- Improvements have been made to the facility that creates air and water
flow
  networks and to the underlying data model.
- The user interface of the ish module has been improved by the
  rationalisation of terminology and the updating of help outputs.


Results Analyzer
----------------
- The facilities for reporting ish shading results have been rationalised
and
  extended.
- The recovery of casual-gains results has been simplified and improved.
- ESP-r has supported the viewing of CFD results by the third-party
  TECPlot tool for some time.  This export facility has been updated
  to support the current format for TECPlot.  Support has also been added
  for an alternative OpenSource CFD results viewing facility called
ParaView.


Climate Data
------------
- Two methods for diffuse solar from global horizontal have been added
  to the clm module to support import of Korean MET data.


Additional Changes
------------------
- Many additional changes have been made that are transparent to the user.
  Information on these, as well as further details on all the
above-mentioned
  changes, can be found in ESP-r Central's change log by providing the
  following URL to your web browser:
     https://esp-r.net/vvc/espr/esp-r/branches/development_branch.