Getting started

oemof.thermal is an oemof library with a focus on thermal energy technologies (heating/cooling). In its original intention it is an extension to the components of the optimization framework oemof.solph. However, some of its functions may be useful for their own.

oemof.thermal is organized like this:

For each technology that is covered, there is a module which holds a collection of useful functions. These functions can be applied to perform pre-calculations of an optimization model or postprocess optimization results. Besides, they may equally well be used stand-alone (totally independent from optimization).

To help setting up more detailed components in a simple way, oemof.thermal provides facades based on the oemof.tabular.facades module. Facades are classes that offer a simpler interface to more complex classes. More specifically, the Facade s in this module inherit from oemof.solph’s generic classes to serve as more concrete and energy specific interface. The concept of the facades has been derived from oemof.tabular. The idea is to be able to instantiate a Facade using only keyword arguments. Under the hood the Facade then uses these arguments to construct an oemof.solph component and sets it up to be easily used in an EnergySystem. Usually, a subset of the attributes of the parent class remains while another part can be addressed by more specific or simpler attributes. In oemof.thermal, some of the technologies have a facade class that can be found in the module oemof.thermal.facades. See the api reference for the facade module for further information on the structure of these classes.

For each module, there is a page that explains the scope of the module and its underlying concept. Mathematical symbols for commonly used variables and their names in the code are presented in overview tables. The usage of the functions and some sample results are given. Lastly, notable references to the literature are listed that the reader can refer to if she wants to get more information on the background.

Finally, there are a couple of examples that can give an idea of how the functionality of oemof.thermal can be utilized. Some models have undergone validation whose results you’ll find in the section “Model validation”.

Using oemof.thermal

Installation

Install oemof.thermal from pypi:

pip install oemof.thermal

Installing the latest (dev) version

Clone oemof.thermal from github:

git clone git@github.com:oemof/oemof-thermal.git

Now you can install your local version of oemof.thermal using pip:

pip install -e <path/to/oemof-thermal/root/dir>

Examples

We provide examples described in the section Examples. Further we developed some complex models with the oemof-thermal components which are described in this section as well.

Contributing to oemof.thermal

Contributions are welcome. You can write issues to announce bugs or errors or to propose enhancements. Or you can contribute a new approach that helps to model thermal energy systems. If you want to contribute, fork the project at github, develop your features on a new branch and finally open a pull request to merge your contribution to oemof.thermal.

As oemof.thermal is part of the oemof developer group we use the same developer rules, described here.