@edpmay ,
There’s a lot of great stuff here and thanks for sharing.
I am not nearly as familiar with the methods for calculating Psi values as they rarely get used over here in the US. Your post and you example here helped me understand a lot more about how these values are calculated and I learned several things. For one, I didn’t realize that the idealized construction that the thermally bridged construction was being compared to could also have thermal bridges within it. There are definitely some changes to the Honeybee Therm components that should be made as a result of this.
Firstly, I’ve realized that we should integrate the UFactorLengths and the DeltaT into the “Read Therm Result” component. I never realized that these pieces of information could be so useful but your file clearly shows that they are important for calculating total heat flow, which can be important for this among other cases. I have added this as an issue here:
If you want to try to add this into the component yourself @edpmay , I will gladly accept a github pull request from you with this addition to the Honeybee components (and then you will get credit as a contributor on the github). Otherwise, I can add this code in and just credit you for the addition at the top of the “Read THERM Result” component.
Secondly, It seems valuable to have your component that calculates the Psi value and total heat flow as a part of Honeybee but I feel that there may be more elegant ways of doing it. Can you think of any cases where we would not have the element length from the BC length and so we would not have to use the two points to define the length? Or is the idea that the element lengths are supposed to be projected into a specific plane for the simulation?
Thanks again for doing this @edpmay ! I’ve already learned a lot.