Hi there,

I am actually looking for a scenario! Yup! Looking for a scenario which makes me heading toward glass layer optimization through the project special form. How you will act if you wanna do some thing like selecting the material of your design if thermal behavior is your goal and you want to choose more economical glass beside covering the facade? or it would be better t say what parameters should I implement to make the scenario validated?

Is there a way to have DIVA on this or not?

any help appreciated.

Tags: Glass, Optimization, Thermal, design, layer

Views: 239

Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Hi Mahdi,

The thermal components of DIVA are a little limited, but you can define custom thermal constructions in the c:\DIVA\Thermal\Rhino\04_material_construction.idf file using the standard EnergyPlus idf file format. A more intuitive way to do this is to use Viper to build up custom window assemblies in Grasshopper.



Thanks Dear Alstan,

Now I'm on it taking your guideline. actually the model I'm now challenging with is something like this, and I'm not 100% percent sure even if could we model this design as "Basic Model 4 thermal" or it should be defined by some other process of modeling?

Hi Mahdi,

I think your model is outside of the bounds of what DIVA is capable of in. You will need to consider mullions as well as glazing in pretty rigorous detail. I'm not entirely sure which software is most capable of modeling something with such complexity though.


HI Alstan,

you're absolutely right, but what is the fact for analyzing these kind of models when we just have such DIVA and all other simulators around? what is the deal if we just keep the volume (as an instance for heating and cooling loads, gotten from a thermal zone definition) set of our zones exactly what we have and ask the simulations going through an steady state working?
I know this kinda questions maybe is not appropriate here and they take times and discussion to be answered but I just want to have your ideas on this.

The more complex/advanced dedicated thermal sim packages can resolve such geometry in greater detail, and multi-zone, too. I think the general question is what you use the simulation for, and what level of abstraction you can therefore justify. What's usually important is to at least retain a relatively good fit between surface areas between the actual design and thermal abstraction, as well as zone volumes. That is, if you are doing baseline vs. design energy use modeling; if you're just comparing variants, you can get away with extreme abstractions if you keep the level of abstraction consistent between compared models, while then realizing what you are actually measuring is not the actual design performance per se, but the relative impact of geometry changes between iterations. However, I would advocate as much accuracy as you can achieve with the individual modeling tool. Eg OpenStudio can model this in greater detail; daylight modeling of something this complex is usually not a big problem, as it "eats" polygon geometry straight from design models, anyways. I agree with what Alstan says- the shading effects of the glass frames could in this case be significant; you could eg check whether that is really so through radiation mapping. Otherwise yes, it is a wide and complex issue.

Reply to Discussion


© 2019   Created by jeff niemasz.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service