ProCoSim — A simulation tool for networks of energy facilities

The energy transition is making energy supply systems more complex. Well-known sources such as gas turbines are being combined with renewables, batteries, heat pumps, and further innovative technologies. Flexibility and resilience demand rise, as energy sectors are being coupled and new energy carriers like hydrogen are integrated. The engineering challenge is often to design all interactions to be efficient, reliable, and resilient. For that, simulative system designs are particularly valuable, as experiments are often not viable or would require strong simplifications. To this end, a large variety of simulation frameworks are available. While there are many advantages to using existing frameworks, building a new framework allows for maximal customization and flexibility. The DLR Institute of Combustion Technology decided to develop its own in-house framework, named ProCoSim, for a variety of reasons. These include the modular integration of ODE and algebraic solvers, explicit and flexible handling of the interactions between component calculations and solvers, and the integration of an acausal component modeling approach with bidirectional signal flow to allow maximal flexibility in the integration of black-box component models. The aim of the framework is to support the design of energy systems consisting of producers and consumers, to analyze their interactions, to optimize operation strategies, and to provide boundary conditions for experiments, e.g. load trajectories for a gas turbine test emulating demands of a virtual energy system. In this paper, the design and implementation process of the new framework are described in detail. The flexibility of its application is shown by two distinct demonstration cases: a thermodynamic system from the field of decentralized energy supply and a mechanical-electrical system in which a hybrid-electric aircraft propulsion system is modeled.