Buildings.Utilities.Plotters.UsersGuide

User's Guide

Information

The package Buildings.Utilities.Plotters consists of models that generate time series plots or scatter plots, and save them in one or multiple html files. The plotters allow for example to plot control sequences such as the one shown below, which was generated from Buildings.Utilities.Plotters.Examples.SingleZoneVAVSupply_u.

Control chart

Usage

First, drag at the top-level of the model an instance of Buildings.Utilities.Plotters.Configuration and enter a value for its samplePeriod, which is the frequency with which data will be written to the plots. This global configuration block is required for the plotters to work. This global configuration block also allows to specify other optional global configurations that are by default used by all plotter instances.

Next, to create time series or scatter plots, drag as many instances of Buildings.Utilities.Plotters.TimeSeries or Buildings.Utilities.Plotters.Scatter and connect them to the signals that you like to plot.

By default, all plots will be written to the file plots.html. This file name can be changed with the parameter fileName, either globally for all plots in the instance Buildings.Utilities.Plotters.Configuration, or for individual plotters in the respective instance. Similarly, the sampling time, which is specified globally in Buildings.Utilities.Plotters.Configuration, can be overwritten by each block.

Activating and deactivating plotters

For some plots such as for control signals, it makes sense to only plot the data when the HVAC system is operating. To allow this, the global configuration block, as well as each individual plotter instance, allows to enable a boolean input port called activate. Through the parameter activation, this boolean input port can be enabled or disabled. If enabled, then the plotter is activated if the signal at this port is true. If it is false, then no data will be sampled. By default, the plotters inherit the activation from the global configuration.

Moreover, it may make sense to not plot data in the first few minutes after the HVAC system has been switched on. For example, one may only want to plot the mixed air temperature at an economizer 2 minutes after the HVAC system has been switched on. To support this, the parameter activationDelay can be set. For example, if activationDelay=120 seconds, then data will be collected for plotting only 120 seconds after activate becomes true. As with the other parameters, the plotters inherit by default the activationDelay from the global configuration, but this value can locally be overwritten. A local overwrite allows for example in an HVAC system to not plot the mixed air temperature for 2 minutes and not plot the room air temperature for 30 minutes after the system has been switched on.

Various examples that illustrate the use of the plotters can be found in Buildings.Utilities.Plotters.Examples.

Implementation

The plotters write an html file with JavaScript that uses the plotly library to render the plots.

Extends from Modelica.Icons.Information (Icon for general information packages).