I have a question that I hope turns into a discourse about best practices and the future of modeling with Pollination.
Currently, the promise of Pollination CAD is that you can make energy models more quickly and with greater fidelity than before. Revit Pollination produces models with thermal zones (rooms) for every room/space in Revit. This is also incredibly easy to do in Rhino CAD.
Energy modeling best practices have suggested for a while to combine similar spaces with the same internal gains and external orientation. However, these combined zones do not align well with Load Calculations that often want every space modeled for ventilation calculations and diffuser sizing.
The primary problem with modeling every space is that it significant increases model translation and simulation times. I recently worked on a 125,000 ft2 model with 500 rooms that took over 3 hours to simulate and took over an hour just to translate from Honeybee to OpenStudio. When I ran it through the OpenStudio Baseline Measure it took 21 hours!
So here are my questions for the community:
- How do we balance rooms and thermal zones in Pollination for both Load Calculations and Annual Energy Simulations?
- What are your best practices for thermal zoning when using Pollination Revit?
- What about Pollination Rhino?
- Would a component in Grasshopper or a method in Pollination for combining Rooms into Thermal Zones help with align with mechanical zoning, while also reducing simulation time?
- What are your best practices for Rooms in Pollination?
Additionally, I would love any feedback on my model set up for the recent project stated previously. This model was incredibly slow and really hampered energy estimates for a recent deadline. Let me know if you have any feedback, here is the model:
20230222 Proposed Model.hbjson (5.5 MB)
ProposedEnergyModel_Internalize.gh (606.4 KB)