I am trying to analyse outdoor comfort and I have some doubts about what is the more accurate method. I started with a very simple example (a small part of street with four buildings and some trees.
At the beginning, I analysed with LB UTCI comfort module and dragonfly modules. I used epw file from LB epw map and define urban conditions with dragonfly to generate a new epw with DF UWG to be used in LB UTCI comfort.
Now I am investigating how to accurate the simulation. I mean how to consider vegetation and its effect (not only shadow but also evapotranspiration) and I see that there is another path to calculate UTCI. As I show, HB UTCI comfort map can be used for outdoor comfort analysis. Is it option that is more accurate? I tried to get some results by turning DF model into HB model but I got duplicated results, the Thermal Matrix show four groups of results (in the image the panel show the last values of group 3 and the first of group 4) and in the results the legend of degrees is over written. Any suggestion of why Thermal Matrix show four values for each point of the grid?
To call a certain method more “accurate” than another can be a little bit tough to pin down because a simple simulation where you have checked to make sure all of the parameters make sense is likely more accurate than a complex simulation where you have not checked a lot of the inputs.
But, generally speaking, the HB UTCI Comfort Map recipe will allow you to account for more things than any analysis performed with only the Ladybug components. So it’s capable of being more “accurate” if you do diligence in checking your model inputs. Some of the things that the Honeybee Map components can account for that the basic Ladybug workflows do not are:
The comfort maps model shortwave solar reflections off of the geometry (not just the sun that directly hits the occupant)
The comfort maps can account for the temperature of surfaces surrounding the human subjects (if the geometry is modeled as Honeybee Rooms), including the fact that surface temperatures are often pretty far from the air temperature when the surface is sitting in the sun.
I don’t know why you are getting duplicated results out of that component but it looks like you’re plugging in a list of models to the UTCI comfort map recipe and this is causing the simulation to run multiple times.
