New elipse zone within an atrium

[ahbuckman]

I hope that someone can advise me on this. I am relatively new to IES.

I have built an atrium consisting of a decent number of zones with each wall appropriately defined as a hole in order to simulate a large airspace whilst maintaining some granularity throughout the zone. The atrium will be underfloor heated with natural ventilation.

I would now like to add a couple of large oblong rooms (pods) which will be effectively floating within the atrium (held by walkways).The only reasons I would like these rooms there are to effectively simulate thermal mass and air flow etc, but also to impose an adiabatic surface as these rooms will be mechanically heated/cooled and will affect the comfort conditions on top of, and around them.

I was wandering:

1) How to draw an ellipse shaped zone
2) How to impose this zone onto a built model without redoing the whole thing, similar to partitioning existing zones.
3) Whether I could just build a component and define it as having an adiabatic surface, which would probably do the trick. I'm not sure if this is even possible.

Many Thanks

[PCully]

Hi,

1. Draw the zone like any other using the tools provided, sounds like you may have to do this in a number of parts and then connect them. SketchUp plug-in could be considered as this is a nice way of importing complex geometry to VE models (import from SketchUp to a new VE project then transfer via GEM file to your own project)

2. You need to cut out the shape before you can place it in, you can't just add a room inside a room as intersecting volumes aren't allowed in a VE model. Have a look at the Trim, Merge, Subtract, connect tools as well as Divide space and Partition tools.

3. No you can't assign these properties to a component.

This to me sounds like it has potential to get fairly complicated and I'm not sure you should be so ambitious, maybe think of ways you can simplify the model to get this same effect from the analysis. Sometimes you need to have a critical realistic assessment on your aims and what the tool can do and not do easily (or at all). I guess it's harder to do this if you are not greatly experienced in the software but perhaps there are some others on here who have had similar efforts and can share?

Phil

[Marc Jensen]

In my experience trying to create any sort of complex ie curved geometry in IES is quite hard and you would be better off using an identical surface area rectangle. Whilst the performance of the space will not change much when there is a cube or a cylinder in the centre of the room if they are the same material and have the same surface area etc. Make some simple tests and go from there..

Now when modelling the building I would save a new copy at each new step etc and make sure that you can fix your mistakes...
In terms of modelling a space in a space, I would slice out the room into two halves and put the pod inside of it, but have found that IES is somewhat limiting with the subtract and merge tool and I have not had much luck with these but others have....


To be honest I would start with a rectangular pod, and build your rooms around them in portions, this will still allow you to have your granularity and if you snap to grid you will have no slivers that will cause simulation problems....

Start small then get complex once you are sure it is giving you the results that you want.

Good Luck

[ahbuckman]

Thanks Phil and Marc,

I've got a while to try and do this (I'm a university researcher) so I will do as you say and start small and get bigger.

If anyone else reading this has any other experience modelling atriums then I would be very interested to hear about it.

Many thanks

Alex