A Digital Twin for the “District LAB” Test Facility : Background, Ideas and current Activities : An Overview

Abstract

District heating systems are an important element for the success of the heat transition and the associated and necessary decarbonisation of the urban heat supply. Although the expansion and transformation of district heating grids towards decentralised supply solutions based on renewable energies or waste heat is accompanied by some advantages, there are also obstacles, especially economic ones. Digitalisation measures appear to be a promising way of counteracting these. The aim of the doctoral thesis presented in this paper is to develop a solution and to test these empirically at the experimental facility “District LAB”. The methods planned to achieve these goals are primarily the creation of a simulation model that contains all the essential thermo-hydraulic components and control structures of the test facility, as well as the transfer of this model into a digital twin that has access to its hardware. Furthermore, a solution regarding the predictive optimisation of the operation strategy is to be developed and subsequently tested. In the following, the planned methods and work steps are presented in detail and the first results of theoretical investigations are shown.