Verification of PyDHN - a Python library for the thermo-hydraulic simulation of district heating networks - through the DESTEST

Due to the scarce availability of monitoring data and, when available, possible confidentiality issues, inter-model comparisons are a valuable way to verify the consistency of results in simulations of District Heating Networks (DHN).This paper presents the verification of PyDHN through the DESTEST, a benchmark test developed as part of IBPSA project 1, currently providing comparison with six other DHN models.We conducted two network exercises (CE0 and CE1) out of the four included or planned in the test and suitable for our tool. The results for the steady-state exercise (CE0) show an accuracy of 84.77%. To simulate the thermal transient exercise (CE1), a simple quasi-dynamic pipe model is developed as a custom component. As the results of only one alternative model,are currently available for CE1, we show a good agreement between the results of the two models on most indicators with an average absolute NRMSE of 17%.