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NREL / EnergyPlus

EnergyPlus™ is a whole building energy simulation program that engineers, architects, and researchers use to model both energy consumption and water use in buildings.
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IDF parsing error for WindowShadingControl in v9.0 and above #7496

Open ayezioro opened 5 years ago

ayezioro commented 5 years ago

Hi, I opened this discussion in the Ladybug discourse and now i think i should report here ... and ask for advice. Checked also this request in unmethours forum. From the later i edited the Energy+.idd file in order to add more fields to the WindowShadingControl. It worked for a while. Now i get to a building where the amount of fields i added is not enough. Of course i can add more, but it can be not enough for other cases.

My question here is twofold:

  1. Is this issue, that all Shading Controls are written to the first object in the idf file, something that can yield wrong results?
  2. In case the previous answer is negative, it will be possible to solve the issue in the next version of the software?

Thanks!! -A.

mjwitte commented 5 years ago

@ayezioro Trying to piece all of this together. Some questions:

a. Is the "IDF parsing error" in IDF Editor? The only solution for this is to extend the IDD object in your local copy of the IDD. b. Does the EnergyPlus simulation complete successfully? c. What software is writing all of the shading controls into a single WindowShadingControl object? If the shading controls are linked to daylighting and the surfaces are in different zones, then the results will likely be incorrect.

ayezioro commented 5 years ago

Hi @mjwitte, In response to your questions:

  1. I see the issue in the IDF editor, though the file was not created directly in this editor. I've already extended the IDD but it is not a stable and always reliable solution. It worked when i was working with, say, 3 floor buildings. When i rise the hight (i.e. 9 floors) it was not enough and the simulation crashed. The thing is you can not know how many lines to extend the IDD.
  2. Yes. The simulation ends (for those cases that the IDD can confine the amount of shading controls assigned to one (or a couple) of windows.
  3. I'm using Honeybee (a plugin for Grasshopper). @chriswmackey, one of the authors, said something changed in the OS SDK after 2.5, but i'm not sure exactly what is going on. As i understand Honeybee uses this SDK for creating the OSM and IDF files. For now the simulations are intended for energy consumption calculations but in the future they can also include daylighting.

I understand this is a messy issue, and probably bad explained. If you need i can provide a link for a sample file.

Thanks!! -A.

mjwitte commented 5 years ago

@ayezioro It would help to see two example idf files, one good and one bad. Please attach them here in a zip file, or send them to energyplus-support@gard.com

mjwitte commented 5 years ago

... or provide a link as you suggested above ...

ayezioro commented 5 years ago

@mjwitte, this is the link with a couple of examples: 3 Floors, which simulates fine 8 Floors, also simulates but can't edit in the idf editor. Complains about the WindowShadingControl. Probably the reason is that the IDD doesn't has enough lines to write the shading controls.

In the 3Floor you'll see that a lot of controls were written for the 1st window, even though they don't belong to it. There are some others that have more than one also.

Thanks, -A.

hongyuanjia commented 5 years ago

@ayezioro I believe this is because IDF Editor did not automatically add extensible fields when current object field number exceeds the total existing field number in IDD. So this is not related to EnergyPlus itself, but indicating that there is a need to improve IDF Editor on handling new extensible fields.

ayezioro commented 5 years ago

@hongyuanjia, There are 2 issues here. One is what you are mentioning. The second is that the WindowShadingControls are assigned, most of them, to one of the windows without regard on the floor, zone or window itself they should be. The later is what makes me more worried becouse the results that can be obtained. The first one is just annoying. From the original discussion i opened at the LadybugTools forum, the last response i get from @chrismackey is that is still a work in progress of many parties (OS team, E+ and IDF maintainers) and the solution is not soon to be found and implemented. I'll be glad to hear @mjwitte 's perspective on this now. -A.

ayezioro commented 5 years ago

Is @chriswmackey, and not as i wrote above. Sorry.

chriswmackey commented 5 years ago

I am sorry that a good part of this issue @ayezioro is posting is not an issue with EnergyPlus and is rather my fault with how I tried to handle the change in ShadingControl in honeybee between E+ 8 and 9.

Essentially, I was not grouping the FenestrationSurfaces by Zone in the ShadingControl objects, which was not important in E+ 8 but is now necessary in E+ 9. I have fixed this in Honeybee and I think that addresses the main issue that @ayezioro was reporting here. There's still an issue with zones having more than 10 FenestrationSurfaces and attempting to apply a single ShadingControl to all of them, which will simulate but will not display correctly in the IDFEditor . So I think extending the fields for ShadingControl in the IDF Editor is really the only issue now.

ayezioro commented 5 years ago

Thanks @chriswmackey !! I can report that the solution implemented in Honeybee is working fine. The issue can still be open becouse of what @chriswmackey is mentioning regarding the amount of fields in the IDF. I guess i misunderstood the source of the problem, so sorry if i make you @mjwitte to dig into this.

Thanks all, -A.

mjwitte commented 5 years ago

Not a problem. This has highlighted a need to extend the idd object (too late for the upcoming v9.2 release, but will slip in for the next one). The existing IDF Editor won't ever autoextend long objects, but there are plans for a new cross-platform version (can't say now when that might be completed).

There's also you question of whether the shading control results are correct when windows from multiple zones are grouped into the same WindowShadingControl object. I still want to investigate that further.

ayezioro commented 5 years ago

Hi @mjwitte, Certainly the first issue you mention is not critical right now. The second i'm not sure is happenning anymore (though is worth to check what you said). After @chriswmackey the shading controls are now registered the same zone according to the amount of window surfaces n it. -A.

mjwitte commented 4 years ago

@JasonGlazer Please add more fields to the end of WindowShadingControl as part of the work on multiple scheduled shades. Maybe go up to 100 surfaces, no need for full idd entries with \note.

JasonGlazer commented 3 years ago

The changes in #8196 did not fix this since it was prior to a release and this would have changed the IDD