Sizing:Zone below-zero (degree C) Zone Cooling Design Supply Air Temperature scenarios for freezer spaces

[jcyuan2020]

Issue overview

For the Sizing:Zone object, there is a recent discussion on how to give warning messages on the zone cooling design supply air temperature that is below 0 degree C (#8855, #8827). A user recently sent in a simulation case modeling a freezer space which uses a -20 C design cooling supply temperature---which may call for the need to lift that restriction.

Also, there is a running failure to report:

During the process of diagnosing an issue the user reported (which is actually not related to Sizing:Zone design supply air temperature), the v9.5 case file was upgraded to pre-release v9.6 (commit ed3a9d3). Now there is another severe error message with “bad allocation”. The failing point seems to be an out-of-bound allocation at lines:
https://github.com/NREL/EnergyPlus/blob/ed3a9d36c86aad48000128ae7975805818f1e207/src/EnergyPlus/SizingManager.cc#L3376-L3381

With this example file, the (paramNum-2) index will have a value of -1 (here paramNum is 1), which causes an out-of-bound (bad allocation) failure in this particular case.

Details

Some additional details for this issue (if relevant):

• Platform (Operating system, version): All
• Version of EnergyPlus (if using an intermediate build, include SHA): pre-release v9.6 only
• Helpdesk ticket number: 15770

Checklist

Add to this list or remove from it as applicable. This is a simple templated set of guidelines.

• Defect file added (list location of defect file here)
• Ticket added to Pivotal for defect (development team task)
• Pull request created (the pull request will have additional tasks related to reviewing changes that fix this defect)

[RKStrand]

@jcyuan2020 I think that the recent work made it a warning message if the user's zone cooling design supply air temperature is below 0 degree C. That's simply to warn a user that there could be a problem. If the user does have a legitimate zone below 0C (like a freezer space), they can always ignore that warning message.

However, the crash because of a bad index is definitely a problem, one that clearly wasn't anticipated. I will look at this issue next as I'm not sure how it passed this index value.