Radiant Floor and Ceiling Cooling and Heating

grasshopper honeybee-legacy
1

I am looking to start modeling an occupied space that uses the floors and ceiling for both heating and cooling.

  1. Can Honeybee model a space with cooling and heating provided by defined surfaces?
  2. Can Ladybug do a comfort analysis with defined surface temperatures?

Perhaps there is a tutorial on this subject.

Please advise.

Sincerely,

Ken Martin

1 Like
2

Hi @kennethwmartin,
To address your second question, I believe yes it is possible to use surface temperatures in Ladybug. The comfort models in Ladybug 1 | analyze Weather Data tab take MRT as input. I believe that is what you’re looking for.

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In Honeybee, the Comfort Analysis Recipe components in 10 | Energy Energy tab may help you analyze what you’re looking for.

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Thank you very much. I will give it a go.

Ken

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@kennethwmartin ,
I will also add that there are HVAC templates for radiant floors and radiant ceiling systems in Honeybee. You just assign them to HBZones with the components in the 9|Energy|HVAC tab:

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You will see that there are only templates for one or the other (radiant floors or radiant ceilings). Are you saying that you will need to have both the floors and the ceiling as thermally active in the same room? If so, we would need a new HVAC template to model it.

@devang’s suggestion is good if you just want to evaluate thermal comfort in the middle of the zone and I would start there. If you need a more spatially deatied study, you can use the microclimate maps:
http://hydrashare.github.io/hydra/viewer?owner=chriswmackey&fork=hydra_2&id=Microclimate_Map_-_Simple&slide=0&scale=1&offset=0,0

2 Likes
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Chris,

Thanks for getting back to me on this. Yes, they are considering having both radiant floors and ceilings at the same time. Also, they will only be in partial areas of a zone. Is it possible to define a surface rather than an entire zone?

Also, I am looking to upload the Honeybee + software and am confused about the installation instructions.

  1. I downloaded the Radiance program and ran it. I have no idea what it has done.
  2. I dont understand the Daysim requirement or where it is found or what it runs in.

Sorry for the novice questions but I have struggled with this for an hour and kept getting lost.

Any help will do.

Ken

7

@kennethwmartin ,

It seems that you can not make what you need with the template systems at this time so your best bet for the time being might be to either:

  1. Build you custom HVAC system in the OpenStudio interface, using the baseline Honeybee radiant system as a guide.

OR

  1. Write an OpenStudio Measure to assign the HVAC system that you are interested in. Writing an OpenStudio Measure will require you to know a bit of Ruby and the OpenStudio API but this is the best that I can offer at the moment. You can assign measures to your Honeybee models using the “Load OpenStudio MEasure” and “Apply OpenStudio Measure” components. If you write your own measure, you can use this Measure as a guide, which assigns a radiant floor system:
    https://bcl.nrel.gov/node/39806

i will see if I can add more customization to the radiant HVAC templates in Honeybee at some point since I have found people in need of the ability to model both different types of radiant constructions (ie. metal panel vs radiant slab) as well as different surfaces (as it seems you need). I have created an issue for this and I will try to address it at some point:

-Chris

1 Like
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Chris,

Do you have a youtube tutorial out on how to set up honeybee+?

Ken

9

I just saw this! It could have been probably a separate question. Here is the instruction to how to set up Honeybee[+]:

If you want to know what’s going under the hood here is a tutorial:

Daysim is only used by Honeybee and not Honeybee[+] and you can download it from Daysim’s website: http://daysim.ning.com/page/download