Dear Saeran,
Thank you very much for the clarification.
I understand that the ideal scenario is difficult to achieve: a component which can deal with a single overall massing of a building in arbitrary form.
Even with the legacy splitMass component, we may still get a core zone in concave shape for a concave building which may cause trouble for EnergyPlus. So, I assume that you may agree that the desirable approach is the one which may involve a bit of manual work: prepare the massing of a building by dividing it into, as few as possible, individual convex volumes, each having a uniform height, before using the splitMass or split2Zone components (as shown below), although this may imply a sharp increase in simulation time due to significant increase in the number of thermal zones.
splitMass_test_v004.gh (549.1 KB)
The visualization of Energy Use Intensity (EUI) for each zone is quite different between the models with and without perimeter zones, but the total building EUI values are quite close in this case (187kWh/m2 for the one with 140 zones, and 186kWh/m2 for the one with 16 zones). I may need to further check if this is the case for different buildings…
Eventually, it comes down to the level of accuracy and efficiency we’re expecting for energy modeling between the options of 1) just getting one single zone for the entire floor, 2) differentiating perimeter and core zones for each floor, or 3) creating detailed zone layout based on actual design for each floor.
Nevertheless, I really appreciate all the hard work you and the team are conducting in refining the functions of the LB+HB components. I hope you understand that I don’t mean to “pick bones”, and I look forward to the updating of the new split2Zone component to deal with concave and courtyard geometries.