Hi,
I have just started using pollination to facilitate interoperability between Revit and EnergyPlus. Is it possible to transfer user-defined materials and wall layers from Revit to EnergyPlus (*.idf)? If yes, what is the procedure?
Thank you in advance,
Arash
Hi @arashdoz ,
We have workflows for assigning EnergyPlus constructions to your pollination models but the workflows we have in the Revit plugin are relatively simple at the moment and we will be fleshing them out more in the future.
Right now, the way to define EnergyPlus constructions in your models exported from Revit is to assign a ConstructionSet to the rooms of your model. Construction sets contain not only the construction definitions but logic for which construction gets applied to walls/roofs/floors with different boundary conditions. More documentation on construction sets can be found here:
To assign construction sets in Revit, you’ll right-click on rooms in last step of the “Export Rooms” dialog and select “Edit Properties”
This will bring up an interface where you can assign constructions sets from a libray that we ship with Pollination, which has construction sets organized by climate zone and years of ASHRAE90.1/IECC. Or you can make your own constructions and construction sets and assign them. More on this interface is documented here:
I realize that is the link to the Rhino plugin documentation but is the properties interface same for Revit.
If the above didn’t answer your question, you may need to clarify what you mean here:
Are you saying that you want to have a certain Revit family for a wall associated with a certain energyplus construction? As I understand it, the families themselves don’t have enough information to be used in energy simulation. So you will always have to do some work of defining and applying your own construction sets. But, if you have an idea of what information you want to try to use from Revit to help assign your energy constructions, we can consider it as we develop out the construction assignment capabilities more.
Thank you, @chriswmackey. I’ll follow your guidance and share the results. In the meantime, the image below illustrates what I mean by a user-defined wall layer and its properties in Revit
Hi @arashdoz, thank you for providing the graphics. We currently don’t export any of the Revit-assigned construction values. That being said, the workflow that Chris suggested above allows you to set the constructions and materials as you wish.
Huh. I did not know that Revit had native support for assigning thermal properties to opaque materials. You’re right that those are technically enough properties to simulate the opaque materials in EnergyPlus if people were to go through and assign all of them.
Do you know if Revit has support for anything with a similar robustness for windows? If I try to look at the same menu for glass, I don’t see a way to get properties like U-Value or SHGC:
I should clarify all of this by saying that the Pollination construction sets are going to be the main way of assigning constructions for the foreseeable future since the vast majority of the requests we have gotten about constructions involve getting the energy model set up without needing to edit the Revit model.
But, if we know that some people would prefer to assign all of these properties in Revit and there is enough support in Revit for the things that are needed for the energy simulation, maybe we can consider some workflows for this in the future.
Thank you, @mostapha and @chriswmackey, for your help and guidance.
