VRF & DOAS Design & Operation
So, I tried the VRF & DOAS measure from BCL in OpenStudio 2.4. I have a few questions.
1) Where in the EnergyPlus output, can I find the VRF outdoor unit capacity (similar to an RTU capacity)? Is the only way to get these to add some VRF-related output variables to the OpenStudio 2.4 reports section and then look at design day numbers in DView or ResultsViewer?
2) On the DOAS side of things, i.e. the "traditional" air loop, rather than the VRF structure, each zone has a field "Account for Dedicated Outdoor Air System", which appears to be set to "No" by default. But since VRF and DOAS do not "communicate" with each other shouldn't this be set to "Yes", so that the outdoor air coming into the zone is viewed as a (mild) load on the VRF terminal for that zone? The effect may be small if the OA is space neutral, but depending on what the various zones are doing, I could imagine OA temperature being off from zone set point by a few degrees?
3) I am doing a ASHRAE 90.102997 Appendix G analysis, requiring to compare a "System 6" (RTUs with PFPB) to a VRF & DOAS system. I always thought that the latter is much more efficient than the former, but I get much more annual cooling and heating energy for VRF & DOAS than for RTU & PFPB. Something is amiss, I am sure. Anyone seen this before?
Comments
compare the VRF curves in your model to the energyplus example/default curves. I have found openstudio curves to result in unexpectedly high energy consumption.
Thank you kindly, TomB. I am looking in EnergyPlus-8.7.0\ExampleFiles\VariableRefrigerantFlow_5Zone.idf and finding things like VRFHeatCapFT, VRFHeatCapFTHi, VRFHeatEIRFT, VRFHeatEIRFTHi, HeatingEIRLowPLR,HeatingEIRHiPLR. Are these the curves I need to be moving over to OpenStudio?
That sounds right. I didn't do anything fancy here, I just copied the values in the curve objects (manually) from e+ examples into the appropriate edit field in my OpenStudio model.
I finally found time to graft the VRF systems from EnergyPlus-8.7.0\ExampleFiles\VariableRefrigerantFlow_5Zone.idf into a "Mitsubishi" library. However, I still get no energy advantage of the VRF/DOAS system over the RTU/VAV system. I do not think that is correct. I saw an advantage only when using the "hack" library I grafted from Daikin eQuest/Trace-700 into a "Daikin" library. Unfortunately, other than a rough comparison of a Trace-700 to an OpenStudio model, I have nothing that would prove I grafted this correctly. Is there no on out there who had gotten to the bottom of this?