Hot Water Convector

The hot water convector is controlled to meet any remaining zone load not met by any other item of equipment in the zone that has a higher heating priority. The control is accomplished by throttling the hot water flow.

 

General

Name

This is a read-only label that is automatically generated by the software and which incorporates the name of the zone in which the convector is located.

Heating design capacity method

There are 3 ways to define the heating capacity of the unit as selected from the following list of options:

 

Heating design capacity

This autosizable field defines the convective electric nominal heating capacity (in W or Btu/h). It is only available when the Heating design capacity method is set to 1-Design capacity.

Heating design capacity per floor area

Enter the heating capacity per unit floor area (in W/m2 or W/ft2) of the unit. This data is only available when the Heating design capacity method is 2-Capacity per floor area.

The program calculates the heating capacity from floor area of the zone served by the unit and the heating capacity per unit floor area value specified here.

Fraction of autosized heating design capacity

Enter the heating capacity as a fraction of the autosized heating capacity for convective electric baseboard unit. This data is only available when the Heating design capacity method is 3-Fraction of autosized capacity. EnergyPlus calculates the heating capacity from the design autosized heating capacity and this fraction. The default value is 1.0.

U-Factor times area value

This is the overall heat transfer coefficient for the convector (in W/K or Btu/h-F) at design conditions. The U-Factor Times Area Value (UA) is used in an NTU - effectiveness calculation. An estimate of the UA can be obtained from:

 

Q = UA × (Twater, avg - Tair, avg)

 

 

Where, q is the heat transferred from water to the air in watts ,Twater, avg is the average water temperature (°C) and Tair, avg is the average air temperature  (°C). Or the LMTD temperature difference can be used.

Maximum water flow rate

This is the maximum hot water volumetric flow rate in (m3/s or gal/min).

Convergence tolerance

This is the control tolerance for the convector output. The convector is controlled by matching the convector output to the zone demand. The model must be numerically inverted to obtain a specified output. The convergence tolerance is the error tolerance used to terminate the numerical inversion procedure. Basically this is the fraction:

 

 

The default is 0.001.

Operation

Availability schedule

This is the schedule that determines whether or not the component is available for each timestep of the simulation. A schedule value greater than 0 (usually 1 is used) indicates that the unit can be on during the timestep. A value less than or equal to 0 (usually 0 is used) denotes that the unit must be off for the timestep.