[esp-r] Re: 18 Floor Apartment Building

[Jon Hand]

This is one of those cases where starting small and only proceeding with complexity
after working practices become well established is recommended.  Being new-to-esp-r
and attempting complex models can be a frustrating experience ;-(

The level of detail in the model directly relates to the nature of the questions
posed by the client.  What kind of performance is of concern to you and to the
client?

For questions that do not require a high level of geometric resolution and for
large building with lots of similar spaces an experienced user would do the 
ground floor, a couple of middle floors and the top floor and use the scaling 
functions within ESP-r to arrive at the performance of the whole building.

If you do one or two zones per apartment you may be undercounting the
impact of internal partitions (lots of them in typical apartments) so be
sure to add some internal mass surfaces in the zones (there is a special
facility to add horizontal or vertical mass into a room).

If the client is interested in finding out the typical performance of different
types of apartments in the building then some practitioners would select
several apartments and represent them explicitly (3-4 zones per apartment)
and deliver specific information to the client and then look at the heating and cooling patterns
and scale them up to the full area of the building.

There are ways to limit the display to a few selected zones (look for the
zones-to-include option in the wire-frame controls).

And putting in the geometry within ESP-r can be efficient - fully attributed
zones can easily be copied and transformed to new locations.  The ESP-r
Cookbook talks about this.  But if you copy to soon you will have a lot
of attribution to complete in the copied zones.

If you are working on Linux or OSX or Cygwin with the X11 interface there
is a click-on-bitmap facility that allows experienced users to input
dozens of zones very quickly (it takes practice and good planning skills
to do this well).

Regards, Jon Hand
________________________________________
From: esp-r-bounces at lists.strath.ac.uk [esp-r-bounces at lists.strath.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Ian McCall [ijmccall at yahoo.com]
Sent: 23 June 2010 17:23
To: esp-r at lists.strath.ac.uk
Subject: [esp-r]  18 Floor Apartment Building

Good-day!

I am new to the ESP-r world and would like a recommendation of how to accurately / efficiently model the energy consumption of an 18 floor apartment building.  Attached are two floor plans of the 1st and 2nd floors (please note that there are significant inconsistencies between the two plans ie. the location of elevators, and stairs etc..). The 1st floor has 47 rooms which I have combined into 10 different zones. The 2nd floor has 39 rooms that I have combined into 11 zones (4 apartments per floor + 1 stairwell + 2 elevator shafts + 4 loggias / mezzanines). The floors numbered 3-18 have the same geometry as the 2nd floor.

Specific questions:

1) I have decided to enter the geometrical data directly into ESP-r model. I think that this is easier then using a 3rd party program (dwg / dxf files) to create the floor plans and then later import the files into ESP-r. Was this the right choice?

2) I have created the 5 floors of geometry and have noticed that I will quickly run out of zones. Can I simplify my model to 2 or 3 floors and then extrapolate the results for an 18 storey building?

3) I have combined all the rooms in the apartments into one large zone and one small zone; hence I am assuming very well-mixed conditions / temperature distributions within a large air volume. Is this combination of rooms possible or do I need to keep the room / apartment complexity in order to accurately model the network flow / dynamic infiltrations?

4) A 5 floor building with 10/11 zones per floor leads to a very visually complicated model in ESP-r. It is very difficult to modify zones / grometry etc.. due to the visual complexity. Is there a way to hide zones?

I am sure more questions will arise as I dive further into modelling this building.

Cordially,
Ian

L'école des Mines de Nantes