EnRSim - A simple calculation tool for renewable based heating networks plant
Abstract
Renewable-based production plants for District Heating Networks (DHN) should be deployed massively in the coming years. The present document introduces to the community a new pre-feasibility study tool, ENRSIM, to simulate such plants. That business-oriented tool allows the simulation of plants with up to 3 different units with an optional thermal storage. The plant model is implemented in Dymola and controlled using field-based expert laws using a co-simulation platform. Computation is performed over 1 year at a time step of 1 hour and takes about 1 minute on a standard laptop. An example including solar, biomass, gas and storage is here presented highlighting the type of results obtained. The example is extended to predictive control highlighting that the latter associated to MILP programming leads to optimal interactions between the components. A minimal increase of 4.3% in renewable energy content and 77% in biomass boiler startups was obtained using predictive control as opposed to field based expert laws.