Dynamic simulation

Owned by Dennis De Beuckeleer
Last updated: Sept 25, 2024 by Kristof Smits
2 min read

The Hysopt software can do dynamic simulations with a time step of 30 seconds. The time step is quite short to allow quick behavior changes in a system (e.g. domestic hot water tapping, quick opening valves, …).

The dynamic simulation in Hysopt has three solvers to allow accurate physical behaviors of a complete system:

  • Hydraulic solver

  • Thermal solver

  • Control solver

To start the dynamic simulation in Hysopt, the user should click on the “Simulate” button visualised below.

After clicking on the “Simulate” button, a pop-up window appears. In the pop-up window, the user can change the start date, simulation duration, and weather profile.

The simulation duration can be up to 20 years, which might be useful when using geothermal energy storage systems. More information about geothermal energy storage systems can be found in Geothermal energy storage templates.

Hysopt supports 3,012 weather profiles in 6 continents and 160 countries, provided by ASHRAE aand Whitebox Technologies. In the following image (green dots) and link, all the locations are visualised. The TYP files are TMY (Typical Meteorological Year) of said locations. More information about a TMY can be found in the Wikipedia link.

http://ashrae.whiteboxtechnologies.com/map-IWEC2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typical_meteorological_year

Weather data based on the International Weather for Energy Calculations (IWEC) Version 2.0. Copyright © 2012 Ashrae (http://www.ashrae.org). Canadian weather data based on CN2019. Copyright © 2019 Whitebox Technologies. Used by permission.

Warnings:

  • “Older” models (before the implementation of the ASHRAE weather profiles) may still use the previously used weather profiles (not from ASHRAE). New models, however, don’t support the previously used weather profiles anymore. The user should make sure he isn’t comparing models with different weather profiles.

  • When changing the simulation duration, the data interval shown in the graphs change as well. So if the user simulates for one day, the visualised data has a high-resolution meaning quick changes in the behavior of the system are visualised. If the simulation duration is 1 month these quick changes in the behavior aren’t quite as clear anymore because of the larger data interval.

  • When simulating with a duration larger than 1 month, the transient behavior of the system isn’t visualised anymore because the time interval would be too large to make any correct observations of the system. Integral values of for instance the thermal power is still visualised in some components.