[00:00:00] In the last video, we covered managing schedules.  In this video, we will look into constructions and material.  Continuing on with the Video4.osm file, let’s go down onto the Constructions page and have a look at the type of information that we can manage on this page.  The tabs available here are Construction Sets, Constructions and Materials.  So just to explain briefly: what is a construction set?  It’s no more than a collection of constructions that define a set of default constructions for different surfaces in your energy model.  For example, here we have a external mass wall defined for all external walls.  Likewise, there’s a construction defined for floors and roofs.  We see fixed windows and doors.  And notice here that the glass doors field is empty.  So in this video, what we’re going to do is create a new construction set and a new construction and we’ll fill in that glass doors field.

[00:01:17] OpenStudio does a really good job of making these construction sets available and easy to use.  If you recall in the Getting Started video, we created a new OpenStudio model from the wizard and in the process of using that wizard, it brought in all of these construction sets that we now see defined in our model.  So these have come in through the Library and they now exist in our model, and that’s made available by the wizard that was used in the Getting Started video that’s about importing in the SketchUp plugin.  There is another way to add more constructions and materials if you need to, and that’s by using the fine components menu.  So that gives you access to the Building Component Library and that opens up the Online Building Component Library search field and through that, we have access to more constructions and materials that are defined and we can download those if we need to.  We won’t do that now, but we’ll jump onto the Constructions page and see what kind of  information is defined here.

[00:02:30] Here we see a particular construction called the air wall.  It’s got the measure tab fields.  Those are optional and those are left blank.  And here we see the layer buildup area.  So we can drop a particular material from this list in the model.  We can drop a material onto the buildup area and here you see it’s got some intelligent sort of feedback on whether that material can be added to that construction.  In this case, as a demonstration, it doesn’t work.  And that’s quite a useful bit of feedback you get from the OpenStudio interface.

[00:03:08] Let’s drill down from the Materials tab and let’s have a look at that air wall material.  So here we see air gap materials, air wall materials.  Let’s have a look at the air wall.  So there’s the air wall material and there’s no particular information on that.  Let’s go back up into Constructions and what we’ll do as an example in this now is to create a new construction to fill in our glass door field on the construction set.  Let’s add a new object and call it glass doors.  We’ll leave the measure tags blank, and we need to put a glazing material here on layer buildup.  So I’m going to go to the My Model view and I’m going to look under Simple Glazing Systems.  And here’s a glazing material that is defined in our construction sets already.  So we drop that here onto the layer view.

[00:04:17] Now just to demonstrate with another idea, this buildup area unfortunately doesn’t allow you to insert; it simply adds to the bottom of our list.  So if I wanted to put another material in between these two materials, it wouldn’t let me do that.  The only thing I can do is drop to the bottom of that list.  So you just need to bear that in mind when you’re building up your construction so that you add them in the correct order.  So that’s a fairly simple construction we’ve now defined.  It’s out glass doors and it has a fixed window material defined up on it.

[00:05:00] So let’s go back up to the Construction Sets.  Now we can make use of the way that OpenStudio allows the construction sets to be defined and what we’ll do is we’ll just drop that glass doors construction here on the glass doors field.  So that completes that default construction set.  As I said, the OpenStudio method for inheriting construction sets allows us to do some things that are quite useful when you’re energy modeling.  As an example, let’s consider the second story of our building and for argument’s sake, we’ll proceed on the idea that the internal walls on the second story are different to the internal walls on the first story.  Now in a case like that, you’ll need to define a new construction for your internal walls on the second story.  But what we’ll do is we’ll demonstrate how the construction set inheritance works.  So what I’m going to do is create a new construction set and I’m going to define a new internal wall type on this construction set.

[00:06:38] So what we need to do is move to the Constructions page and create a copy of the existing internal wall.  Let’s copy that.  We’ll call this Internal Wall Story 2.  Now what I want to do on this construction is to insert some insulation into this buildup.  So as I said, you can’t insert the material, so you need to add them in order.  So I’m going to have to delete the air resistance and the gypsum board, and now I’m going to insert some insulation.  From the Library, I’ll look for a material.  Let’s grab some insulation board.  Now we’ll look for our air gap materials.  We’ll add in air gap and go back and add another bit of gypsum board to the final layer.  So there we have a new internal wall and we’re going to find this on level two of our building.  So that’s defined at the construction level.

[00:07:43] We’ll go back to our construction sets.  I’ll now add that new internal wall to the internal wall field, so interior surface condition walls.  I’m going to drop that new construction link into this position here.  Now that’s the only construction that’s different on level two in this example.  So we don’t have to define these other fields; we’ll leave those blank.  And then what we can do on the Facility tab is to define the default construction set as this original construction set.  And then what we’ll do when we move to the stories is on building story two, we’ll add the other construction set.  So here we have this construction set that we just created.  Now if we drop that one there, the only difference between that Construction Set 1, and the original was that internal wall that we edited and changed.  So the building story two will inherit that different internal wall but all the other constructions will be the same as for the rest of the building, which is defined at a higher level here on the default construction set.

[00:09:24] So at this point, we’ve defined our constructions and construction sets that we’ll need for our energy model and we’ve showed how to create new constructions and also given you a sense of how to use the hierarchy information defined through the OpenStudio model to make variations, in this case, by changing just internal walls on level two.  So let’s save our video here, and in the next video, we’ll move on to look at the Loads page.