The transformation of energy-intensive industries towards greenhouse gas neutrality leads to increasing complexity of industrial energy supply systems. This affects particularly thermal energy systems due to waste heat utilization measures as well as the integration of renewable energy sources and further storage capacities. This complexity is also reflected in the control strategies of such systems, which makes the development of dynamic simulation models for testing them a research field of growing interest.

The ThermalSystemsControlLibrary is a novel Modelica library, which aims at standardized modeling of industrial energy supply systems for control strategy development. Based on a generic data model, all components cover physical as well as control modeling and are particularly suitable for testing supervisory control strategies within external frameworks using the FMI standard. The library is validated for an exemplary use case of an industrial energy supply system comparing two different supervisory control strategies.

This article reports on our experience in creating Modelica models for systems with thousands of configurations and closed-loop controls. The development of such templates required exploration of class parameterization techniques and data structures for handling large sets of equipment parameters. By describing these issues and the approach taken, we show how the Modelica language can support advanced templating logic. The main limitation we encountered relates to parameter assignment and propagation. The interpretation of parameter attributes at user interface runtime, or the handling of non-trivial constructs involving record classes at compile time is not consistently supported by Modelica tools. This leads to choices that are difficult to make when looking for a generic implementation.

Hydrogen will play a key role in the global energy transition if we are able to produce it with low-carbon emissions. However, clean hydrogen production today is mostly limited to demonstration projects ranging from 2 up to 20 MW. Modeling the way low-carbon hydrogen is produced, stored and used will allow us to significantly improve our understanding of how clean hydrogen could be produced and thus increase the production efficiency.

In this paper, we show that the newest version of ThermoSysPro (TSP), an open-source Modelica library for modeling energy systems, provides a suitable framework to model and simulate the hydrogen production, storage and consumption. The model presented in this paper contains three electrolyzers, a storage station and a vehicle station. We present how the model was built, which components were adapted and how, and show that its simulation can be useful in the design phase, as well as for diagnosis purposes.