PNNL

Abstract

EnergyPlus is a simulation program that requires a large number of details to fully define and model a building. Hundreds or even thousands of lines in a text file are needed to run the EnergyPlus simulation depending on the size of the building. To manually create these files is a time consuming process that would not be practical when trying to create input files for thousands of buildings needed to simulate national building energy performance. To streamline the process needed to create the input files for EnergyPlus, two methods were created to work in conjunction with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Preprocessor; this reduced the hundreds of inputs needed to define a building in EnergyPlus to a small set of high-level parameters. The first method uses Java routines to perform all of the preprocessing on a Windows machine while the second method carries out all of the preprocessing on the Linux cluster by using an in-house built utility called Generalized Parametrics (GPARM). A comma delimited (CSV) input file is created to define the high-level parameters for any number of buildings. Each method then takes this CSV file and uses the data entered for each parameter to populate an extensible markup language (XML) file used by the NREL Preprocessor to automatically prepare EnergyPlus input data files (idf) using automatic building routines and macro templates. Using a Linux utility called “make”, the idf files can then be automatically run through the Linux cluster and the desired data from each building can be aggregated into one table to be analyzed. Creating a large number of EnergyPlus input files results in the ability to batch simulate building energy performance and scale the result to national energy consumption estimates.