[TRNSYS-users] Advice on TRNSYS application

[Michael Calcoen]

Dear TRNSYS-users,

Our company has been looking into the obtaining the TRNSYS software for quite a while now and hence I would like to get a view of people working with the software on a regular basis. I have tried the demo software extensively as well.

To give a bit of background: We are an engineering company in industrial refrigeration and process cooling. Over the years, we have relied extensively on EES and internally developed load simulation tools for our system modelling and simulation requirements. For the various system components and control logics we want to model, we have developed our own governing equations and curve-fits which can be altered to suit each system. Although suitable for many projects, EES is only able to solve 'quasi steady state' models. Hence, we can do annual simulations to predict a system's annual energy consumption, but we can't simulate transient behaviour required to model for example thermal storage.

At the moment, we think there are two drivers to move to TRNSYS. Firstly, we would be able to model systems where it is required to simulate transient behaviour. Secondly, as TRNSYS has a modular structure, we feel there may be a reduction in time required to develop models. Since EES is fully equation-based, the mathematical equation-equivalent of complex and large systems can become quite extensive and tedious to develop. It seems TRNSYS would more readily enable the re-use of sub-models in various projects and therefore reduce time to develop and check models.

The biggest question mark around TRNSYS is this: By researching the possibilities and available components, I am now 100% convinced we will need to develop our own component models for many of our system components and control systems. In essence, I don't see this as a problem. However, after reading through the several manuals, working with the demo and reading the various threads on this mailing list, it seems we can expect a lot of trouble/problems when developing components. As one example, there seems to be no clear guidance on which Fortran compiler to use. Many people recommend an old compiler (Compaq Visual Fortran) which is no longer available. There seems to be no information which details how to develop new components with for example the latest Intel Visual Fortran Composer XE 2013. Besides that, I can see many people struggling on these threads with errors that are seemingly impossible to correct of solve. Are these merely problems related to the Fortran programming itself? I may be wrong, but there seems to be not much technical support for people who are required to develop their own components.

As you can see, we are struggling with the above issues. I would be delighted if people could share their thoughts on this and offer some advice.

Kind regards,

Mick Calcoen
Lead Consultant

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