A few weeks ago I was presenting a three hour workshop on Revit + Insight for the AIA San Antonio COTE committee, sponsored by Autodesk. A good question came up about how to define a spandrel panel within a curtainwall. My answer was "I don't know, but it will probably be answered in a blog post someday". That "someday" is today:)
I wrote this post about that workshop: AIA San Antonio - COTE Committee workshop - Early Energy Modeling with Revit and Insight.
The question was asked by someone I've know for several years, Brian Payne!
What I found was the trigger, for a curtain panel to not be glass, is tied to the transparency setting on the Graphics tab, in the Material editor. As shown in the image above, if the transparency is 3% or lower, it becomes an 'exterior wall' analytical surface, rather than 'fixed window'. This is true, even though (in this example) I duplicated the glass material and only adjusted the Graphics tab; the appearance tab is still set to glass.
The thermal properties for the spandrel panel come from the 'mass exterior wall' setting within the energy settings, conceptual types dialog.
Fun stuff.
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