SBE Intern Blog (6 Feb 2019)
Oscar:
Starting to hear the MUSIC
This week, the fully licences MUSIC program was finally purchased for SBE, and it was my role to understand it as best I can. I decided to tackle this task by working on a project with the program, whilst writing a ‘users guide’ for Sean and Roberto alongside whenever I noticed something of interest. It’s a very user intensive program, requiring significant inputs about the site and proposed treatment measures to allow the program to run properly. Put these requirements alongside the individual council’s requirements, and the program becomes fairly complex! Nonetheless, it’s been great to slowly determine the ins and outs of the software, and apply it to a project. Different to STORM, when using MUSIC you can look at ‘bigger picture’ stormwater treatment measures on larger projects, such as stormwater wetlands, detention tanks, etc.
Outside of working with MUSIC this week, I was also adjusted some older BESS reports which have come back with design changes. Besides that, the main focus has been working on MUSIC!
As always, I’m looking forward to what next week brings.
Millie
We opened a can of worms, Rob!
(Just being fair, Sean got featured last week)
This week marks the commencement of the Casey Green Precinct project – challenging much as it involves 5 types of townhouses in different positions and orientations. (Apartments coming soon!) In order to get an accurate representation of energy simulation results for each of the units (we’re using FR5 for town planning submissions), we spent some time on grouping them in types, by their positions (corner vs middle) and their orientations.
That equals to 5 x 2 x 2 = around 20 townhouse units required for simulation, as much as I’m happy with the simplicity of doing 1 base case for each type, then adding windows for the corner types ( x 2), then spinning them around to their opposite orientations (x 2), essentially 20 models is still quite a lot of work. (Not complaining since I looked at Oscar’s MUSIC software and I think I got the easier task, having said that Oscar helped me with 4 models).
So this is the sequence of how we gradually opened a can of worms:
As Oscar is a more efficient modeler than I am, he finished 4 of the models first, and gave me a template of the construction material performance specifications.
Without further discussing with Rob (tell me why I didn’t ask), I proceeded to apply the construction template to 20 models
Results seem good showing 6.2-7.5 Nathers Star rating, I was already working on the report marking down heating and cooling loads
One of the corner townhouses got 5.8 Nathers Star rating, fell below the minimum requirement for compliance of 6 stars.
Rob and I redesigned the construction material performance specs in order to make the worst performing townhouse comply – during the process we’ve taking out ceiling insulation that I’ve wrongly added because they shouldn’t be required between partitions of 2 conditioned spaces, which implies the other constructions have to improve in performance.
I reapplied the latest construction template to all models – stuck with one of them that fell down to 5.1 Star instead of improving, most likely due to excessive exposed ceiling and floor area compared to other units, so this has now become our worst performance unit.
Repeat step 4-6.
I hope Rob doesn’t come back next week to too nasty a surprise :\