Modeling Indoor Ice Rink with Ideal Air System

grasshopper honeybee
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1

Hello everybody,

I’m currently working on a simulation of an indoor ice rink/ice hall located in the Swiss mountains. The indoor temperature needs to stay between 2°C and 6°C, which is how I’ve set up my heating and cooling schedules.

I’ve also added ventilation (based on previous calculations) using an occupancy schedule, and included infiltration in the program.

This zone has been isolated for testing purposes, but in the full model it is part of a multi-zone setup.

I have a couple of questions regarding the simulation settings:

  1. Ice surface modeling with “HB Other Side Temperature”
    To represent the cold ice surface, I used the HB Other Side Temperature component and set it to -7°C.
  • Does anyone have experience with this approach?
  • Is there a better or more physically accurate way to model the ice surface?
  • I noticed this has a massive influence on cooling energy — it basically drops to zero, which makes me a bit skeptical.
  1. Cooling Supply Air Temperature behavior
    I changed the Cooling Supply Air Temperature to 1°C in the Ideal Air System, since I want to cool the room down to around 6°C.

However, when I check the sizing in the “in.idf” file, I still see the default 14°C.
Also, if I simulate without the ice surface (without the -7°C “Other Side Temp”), I get the following warning:

** Severe ** UpdateZoneSizing: Cooling supply air temperature (calculated) within 2C of zone temperature

  • Is there a way to change the default supply air temperature in Honeybee (without manually editing the IDF)?
  • Or is the manual IDF edit the only way?
  1. Do I actually care about Supply Air Temperatures?
    Since I’m only interested in how much energy it takes to maintain my room temperatures (2–6°C), do I need to care about supply air temperatures?

At this point, I’m not concerned with airflow rates. (i’m aware that it might result in unrealistically large airflow, but that’s fine for now)

I’ve attached a cleaned-up version of my simulation.
Icerink_Simulation.zip (119.2 KB)

Thanks a lot in advance for any advice, tips and tricks!
Simon