Common fatal errors occurring using thermal analysis and other patches such as the daylight analysis can derive from the follows causes:
In general
1. All folders and subfolders, where the program stores working and temporary files, contain spaces or abnormal ascii characters. To fix this, check directories for them and remove them.
A common mistake is to save the .epw file in these kinds of folders and subfolders. First, check in the program’s canvas the panel compont extracting .epw data an control that is not empy.
2. Make sure surface the rhino model is drawn with units of measure in meters
Most common problems from incorrect modeling
3. Convex surfaces are detected and Energy Plus doesn’t accept this kind of spaces determining fatal error in daylight analys and minor problems in thermal analysis. To avoid this kind of problems decompose your geometry in simple boxes and/or check your model in order to be sure all your model is defined by non-convex surface. To spot non-convex surfaces (non-convex rooms) “Imagine you’re drawing lines from one vertice of a surface to all other vertices and you’re doing this for all the vertices of a surface. Now if all those lines fall totally inside the surface then it’s a convex surface. If any of the lines or even a part of it falls outside of the surface then it’s a non-convex surface”. Again, only non-convex surfaces (rooms) are accepted!
4. Some adjacencies are not solved. Normally this kind of problem occurs when your model is not correctly drawn. For a better understanding of this concept please check this video tutorial out by Chris Mackey > The Laws of Geometry in E+ Part 1: Adjacent Surfaces
In any case to detect geometry problems check the geometry out using the Model Checker in the patch!
Problems deriving from some mistake in operating the thermal analysis patch (Note this information refer to the patches contained in Mailab Resources).
5. Not all the thermal blocks are analyized. The 03. Splitting Masses patch was not exploded in order to match the number of masses in your models. Follow directions contained in the relative Panel component
6. One or all the Selector components in the 06-Zone Adjacency patch refer to the same thermal block. Please select one by one each thermal block in different Selector components.
7. No contextual mass was assigned. To solve the problem assign a contextual mass using the 01. 2 Mass for context patch or disconnect the wire on the node -HBContext in the component 14. Start Energy+Kernel Computation
8. LadyBug and HoneyBee libraries are not compatible with the Grasshopper version you are running. NOTE: The patches available for download use Honeybee & Ladybug 0.0.64 for Rhino 6. Using different version could cause problems. In that case it is strongly recommended to rebuild the patches with the owned version.
