A benchmark for the simulation of meshed district heating networks based on anonymised monitoring data

With the increasing interest in District Heating Networks (DHNs) as a potential solution to decarbonize heating, new simulation tools are being developed, raising the need for standardized benchmarks to validate their performance. Currently, the main benchmark used for DHN simulation models is the DESTEST, which consists in an inter-model comparison on the simulation of a toy radial network. However, no common benchmarks based on monitoring data from a meshed network exist at the moment, which would be needed to complement the DESTEST. To address this issue, this paper presents aggregated monitoring data from a medium-sized meshed DHN and proposes a benchmark based on this data. While aggregating the data and assuming steady-state conditions is not a suitable strategy for representing locally high dynamic behaviours, applying the benchmark to an existing simulation tool showed that the simulation results are coherent with the published monitoring data, as a low difference in temperature across most available sensors is found. The published data and the proposed benchmark aim to encourage the development of more accurate models for DHNs and to facilitate the evaluation of the performance of different simulation tools and enable their optimization, which will ultimately lead to more efficient and reliable DHNs.