Hello!
I'm modelling a 49-story building using Design Builder, and it has three separate HVAC systems (the first one on the 16th floor for the first 15 floors, the second is on the 32nd floor for the 17-31 floor and the last is on the 49th floor for the 33-48 floor). So, something I was wondering about is the possibility of designing separately the three groups before mentioned so that I can get the whole energy consumption by summing each energy consumption. I mean, something like “divide and conquer”.
If so, it would be really important for me since It would make my program not only faster but also without many fails because of its heavy size, as long as it is feasible and correct according to LEED. This is my first question.
My second question is the following; in my design I have many floors that are exactly the same, so I would like to know if there is a way to design only one of them and specify somehow that detail and how to specify that I’m assuming that.
Thanks in advance.
Marcus Sheffer
LEED Fellow7group / Energy Opportunities
LEEDuser Expert
5921 thumbs up
August 20, 2012 - 9:05 am
Are you proposing to create three separate models and then add them together? I suppose that could work assuming there are no shared systems. I will make your LEED submission more complicated so make sure you do a good job of justifying and explaining what you have done.
We modeled a high rise recently in DB/EnergyPlus and our approach was to model one floor and make sure that that floor was working correctly. There were two primary floor types and they we stacked together. Once we had the two primary floor types working we then simply multiplied to get the required number of floors.