Building an Open-Source Hydronic Heating System Simulator

This paper presents the design, development, and use of an open-source, modular hydronic heating system simulator called HydronicPy, implemented in Python, enabling the testing of different controller designs for various zone construction scenarios. The simulator version presented in this work contains multiple customizable building components, active and passive heat load sources, and a catalog of materials with their thermophysical properties for further consumption during the simulation. HydronicPy uses non-linear differential equations for most components to model their time-dependent dynamics. This work shows the applicability of HydronicPy for controller design performance benchmarking.