I’m modeling the thermal comfort of an outdoor pavilion. Since it’s an unconditioned and mostly unenclosed space I am using the UTCI comfort metric. I wanted to build the structure as an “indoor” space in Honeybee for a number of reasons relating to some specific things I wanted to include in the model, but it is unconditioned and highly naturally ventilated, so for all intents and purposes is an outdoor space.
I noticed that when creating UTCI maps, the wind speed input in the UTCI map does not affect the results of the map. I see that for interior spaces, the default wind speed is 0.5 m/s, but it seems like you can’t override that wind speed with higher values. I would expect to have higher wind speed values in my largely unenclosed pavilion, and the client’s main concern is cold stress so I would want to test out higher wind velocities anyway.
Here is the UTCI map of my model at 0.5 m/s wind speed:
and when I change the wind speed to 5.0 m/s, I get the same result:
I also tested this out with the UTCI calculator plugin, just using MRT. And the UTCI should be dropping from 6.2 C to -8.2 C for an increase in wind velocity from 0.5 m/s to 5.0 m/s. Note that the UTCI in the calculator for 0.5 m/s matches closely with what I’m seeing in the UTCI map for any wind speed.
I’ve uploaded a highly simplified version of my grasshopper file so the problem can be recreated.
UTCI_Test.gh (84.8 KB)