Marcus Fuchs

TEASER: an open tool for urban energy modelling of building stocks

The energy supply of buildings in urban contexts is undergoing significant changes. The increase of renewable sources for electrical and thermal energy generation will require flexible and secure supply systems. To reflect and consider these changes in energy systems and buildings, dynamic simulation is one key element. Sparse and limited access to detailed building information as well as computing time are challenges for building simulation on urban-scale. In addition, data acquisition and modelling for building performance simulation (BPS) are time-consuming and error-prone. To enable the use of BPS on urban-scale, this paper presents TEASER, an open framework for urban energy modelling of building stocks (open-source at https://github.com/RWTH-EBC/TEASER). TEASER provides an interface for multiple data sources, data enrichment and export of ready-to-run Modelica simulation models. The paper presents TEASERs methodology and package structure. Three use cases show TEASERs capabilities on the building, neighbourhood and urban scales.

Urban Energy System Simulation using the Functional Mock-up Interface

The growing level of complexity in urban energy systems (UES) makes integrated simulation models indispensable. Efforts to link models of different domains have been made, but only few integrated approaches exist. Most building simulation models show either high computational effort or a low level of detail, which reduces their applicability for district analyses. The presented approach consistently uses reduced order models that only capture key effects for the simulation of UES, leading to comparably low computational effort. We make extensive use of opensource tools and show how the integration of those can be accomplished within a Python framework using the functional mock-up interface (FMI) standard. In order to adapt the environment to the purpose of a particular UES analysis, its individual modules are replaceable. Harnessing this flexibility, a case study was conducted, analyzing an UES of eight buildings with different structural and operational designs. In addition to the general feasibility of the proposed framework for simulation-based design of UES, the results show the positive effect of grid-driven electric heating devices (EHD) on the power grid. By this means, a reduction of the transformer flow bandwidth by 40 % is achieved.