Energy+/HoneyBee Error: Zero or negative surface area

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Chris Mackey on December 14, 2015 at 8:07pm

Claudia,

Your issue is very clearly a geometry one and I can tell you precisely that it happens because your Honeybee Zone is not closed:

Zones must be closed volumes of air and so you can always tell if your model geometry is going to fail if your HBZone is not closed as you see in the image above.  An easy way to find the problem spots of your model is to bake the zone and do a DupBorder command and this will show you all of the holes of your model:

It looks like you had a lot of window surfaces that were not coplanar with the walls. I deleted these windows and retraced the walls so your model is running fine now (see attached gh file), although the hundreds of surfaces means that it takes an hour to run.  Anything that you can do to reduce the number of surfaces is going to help you a lot.  EnergyPlus is not a program that you can simply throw any geometry into.  Also, as a general note, EnergyPlus does not like it when you put window surfaces right up against the edge of the wall surface as you do here:

You have to leave some room between the window and the wall edge.

-Chris

Attachments:

• Floor_CWM.gh, 650 KB

Permalink Reply by Claudia on December 15, 2015 at 1:34am

Hi Chris,

Thanks a lot for your quick answer!!

Now that i´ve been accepted i can directly write on this post :)

I didn´t know that "EnergyPlus does not like when you put window surfaces right up against the edge of the wall surface", so good to know for the future, thanks a lot.

I would like to ask you another thing: when i open your gh file i recive this message:

"IO generated 4 message, would you like to see them?", is this related maybe to different plugins you used that i haven´t installed yet? could you please tell me their name?

Thanks a lot again!!

All the best

Claudia

 

Permalink Reply by Chris Mackey on December 15, 2015 at 6:06am

Claudia,

I did not add components from any other plugins. What do the messages say?

-Chris

Permalink Reply by Claudia on December 15, 2015 at 6:32am

Hi Chris,

Actually, I don´t know why, now seems to be ok and i haven´t received any message again!I´m really sorry for the inconvenience!

Anyway there´s still a "problem"...unfortunately i still get no results from this simulation because the "Run Energy Simulation" component gives me this error:

"This Simulation has not run correctly because of this severe error

**Severe**Problem in interior solar distribution calculation (CHKBHS)"

What am i doing wrong? :(

I saw a past discussion where you were recommending to run the simulation without interior reflections using the Energy Simulation Par component (am i right?), but i still get no results.

Thanks in advance

(Without your help my master thesis didn´t go forward so really thanks a lot!!)

Sincerely

Claudia

 

Permalink Reply by Claudia on December 15, 2015 at 8:13am

Chris,

I´ve solved the problem, it was my fault!

Thanks a lot for your support!

Claudia

Permalink Reply by Chris Mackey on December 15, 2015 at 11:07am

Claudia,

Glad that you figured it out and that you found the discussion related to CHKBHS.  For anyone following this thread, you can find CHKBHS answers here:

http://www.grasshopper3d.com/group/ladybug/forum/topics/interior-so...

For accurate sub-zone results, Claudia, I would usually recommend breaking up a geometry as complex as your  building into several zones with air walls between them.  Your current model will give you decently accurate values for your overall building loads, though.

-Chris

Permalink Reply by Claudia on December 16, 2015 at 9:16am

Chris,

I´m sorry to disturb you again, but i´ve still some problems with the windows.

I should work with them, changing their dimensions in order to get different % of opaque area (so i can start finally the optimizaiton), but i don´t know how to add windows or to scale the ones that i have because the times i´ve tryed i´ve always got open brep in the output of the "Honeybee add HBGlz" component :(

Can you help me?

i attach you the rhino and grasshopper files again

 

Thanks a lot

Claudia

Attachments:

• Floor.3dm, 2.2 MB
• Floor_CWM.gh, 692 KB

Permalink Reply by Chris Mackey on December 16, 2015 at 6:19pm

Claudia,
As I stated earlier: An easy way to find the problem spots of your model is to bake the zone output from the addHBGlz component and do a DupBorder command on this baked geometry. This will show you all of the holes of your model.
-Chris

Permalink Reply by Claudia on December 17, 2015 at 9:55am

Hi Chris,

you were right sorry for asking you again the same question.

Anyway i´m tring to run a daylight simulation and i don´t know why for some reason only some windows are considered as radiance material (checked with the label zone surfaces component) while other windows are not counted.

I´ve also tried if it depends on the normals of the windows, using the flip component, but it doesn´t change.

Do you know why?

Have you got any suggestion?

Thanks a lot

Claudia

Permalink Reply by Chris Mackey on December 17, 2015 at 6:24pm

Claudia,
I am not sure if I am understanding your issue well but it looks like some of your windows are not perfectly coplanar with the wall surface. Generating your window surfaces by copying and using scale1D on the wall surface will help ensure that your geometry is correct. An easy way to check if surfaces are coplanar is by selecting both the wall and window and using the "intersect" command. If they are coplanar, you should see the window outlined with a curve.
-Chris