Energy Plus Simulation Error 12/24/2020

[Narchitect94]

Good afternoon everyone!

I have been following Chris Mackey’s 2014 HoneyBee Tutorials and have suddenly run into some severe and fatal errors at the simulation step. I have been struggling to find out the problems for a couple days and hoping I could be guided to a solution here. Thank you in advance!!!

P.S I have just downloaded all the engines such as Energy plus, DAYSIM, open studio & Therm last week so I assume I’m using the latest version for everything.

Best Regards,
Iatty

[MingboPeng]

I think you have a newer EnergyPlus version that HB legacy plugin doesn’t support. Updating the legacy version from Food4Rhino, and replacing those old components will solve the issue.

[chris]

Right-o. If you want to use legacy Honeybee, the version of OpenStudio that I would recommend installing is 2.9.1 (and no later if you want full functionality).

Radiance is a bit more backwards compatible and so I think that should be fine if it’s the latest.

[Narchitect94]

Thank you both very much @MingboPeng @chris! I did what you guys said, both updating to Honeybee 0.66 and Ladybug 0.69 respectively, and replaced the open studio 3.0.1 with a 2.9.1 version. Unfortunately these were the errors when I ran the simulation again. What could be the problem here?

[furtonb]

My guess would be that you have non-planar geometry as your input.
EnergyPlus doesn’t support non-planar geometry, which gives you an error (check the .err output file in your generated outputs). AFAIK, in general it won’t run the simulation if you have “Severe” errors.

This status gives you a quick overview of whether there were warning (should look at), severe (should probably fix) or fatal (must fix) errors in the run as well as the time it took for the simulation to complete.

(EnegyPlus Getting Started Guide 3.2.4)

You need to subdivide your curved geometry into planar segments:

Issues with non planar surfaces and energy simulation

I am trying to run a microclimate analysis on a geometry with curvey surfaces and having issues with the energy simulation part… i have multiple approaches for creating the HB geometries that work perfectly on different types of analyses. option 1: introduce whole geometry as a closed brep and add HB glazing based on window surfaces… this works for fine for my daylight simulation… when i try to use this approach to run the energy simulation i get an error saying and this is running one 1 zone. …

As a side note: without an uploaded script it’s very hard to give you a proper solution based on the warning log only. I recommend you read the following post for the future on what to attach to your posts:

Ladybug Tools Forum Guidelines

The purpose of this forum is to help each other and all members of this online community are volunteers who share their knowledge in the interest of making the world a better place. As such, the following are guidelines for seeking our help and, while they are not hard-and-fast rules, adhering to them is a sign of respect to our community and will boost your chances of getting help quickly. Start small, evaluate, and then build up It is recommended that you build your workflows incrementally. …

[Narchitect94]

Thanks @furtonb, turned out it was a combination of not using an epw file locating in the C drive and some unknown geometries issues possibly related to the glazing creation from surfaces. However, it seems to have worked just fine after I redrew all the geometries and linked in a valid epw file.