Using structural elements as a part of energy simulation

grasshopper honeybee
1

Hello, I am performing an energy simulation for a factory building. It is huge open space of 300m*300m with mostly mechanical equipments. Therefore, there is only the external facade and the interior of the building has a huge open space with only concrete columns and steel truss beams.

There are different zones within this open space where different types of machineries are installed which produces a lot of heat during its operation.

With this background, I thought the concrete columns and the steel beams would absorb the heat emitted from the equipments and become a thermal mass in itself. Hence if I perform a energy simulation neglecting them, it would not provide an accurate result.

Is there any way to include these structural elements into my simulation?

Please let me know!

2

Hi @Ramana ,

My gut is telling me that you might be overestimating the benefit you’d get from steel structure but I don’t know your building and maybe there’s a lot of concrete surface area. If you want to get an understanding for yourself, the HB Internal Mass component can be used to add more mass into your Room beyond that which is already a part of the Room geometry. You can see that the component even allows you to plug the _geo in for your column geometry in order to get the surface area correct.

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