Verification of an open-source Python library for the simulation of district heating networks with complex topologies

District Heating Networks are seen as a popular solution for the decarbonation of space and domestic hot water heating by the use of renewables or waste heat. Their design and operation can be enhanced both environmentally and economically through the use of dedicated simulation tools. This work presents a new multicomponent Python-based software library including an efficient steady-state model for the hydraulic simulation and a Lagrange-based dynamic model for the thermal part. The model is verified on real data from a meshed DHN with a granularity of 15 min. For the considered period of 6 days, the model estimated the return temperatures of two heat plants with a mean error of 0.08 K and 0.43 K and standard deviations of 0.56 K and 0.71 K respectively. On the hydraulic part, after applying a fixed correction factor, the error on the pressure differences was estimated in 3 peripheral locations of the network. In the worst case, the relative error distribution had a mean of 0.38% and a standard deviation of 8.74%. Finally, the implemented hydraulic solver achieved a speed improvement over the standard loop method of 17.5%.