The HyControl research project develops hardware-in-the-loop tests for the development of dynamic control systems for process engineering plants. The aim is to enable flexible chemical processes based on renewable energy, for example for hydrogen production and methanol synthesis.
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Many chemical plants were designed for continuous operation using fossil energy sources. In an energy system based on renewable energy, these boundary conditions change fundamentally: electricity from wind and solar is not available constantly. Electricity prices also fluctuate, meaning that flexible plant operation can offer economic advantages in many respects.
To ensure that industrial processes can continue to be operated efficiently, plants should in future be able to respond to fluctuating energy supply. This is precisely the challenge addressed by the HyControl research project, which focuses in particular on hydrogen production processes as well as downstream chemical processes such as methanol synthesis.
The goal is to develop new methods for designing and testing instrumentation, control, and automation systems for process engineering plants. A central approach is the use of hardware-in-the-loop testing (HiL) with real-time-capable simulation models.
Funding: The Ministry of Economic Affairs, Industry, Climate Action and Energy of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, co-funded by the European Union, is supporting HyControl with a total of €1.96 million over a period of three years as part of the Energie.IN.NRW innovation competition.
Hardware-in-the-loop makes it possible to couple real control and automation systems with a real-time simulation model of a plant. The simulation generates the same sensor and actuator signals as a real plant.
This makes it possible to test control and automation concepts under realistic conditions, even before a plant is built.
“HiL simulates real operating conditions and thus delivers results before the plant is built. This saves time and costs in the development of control and automation systems for new, climate-friendly chemical plants.”
Dr. Matthias Fischer
Forschungszentrum Jülich (INW-4)
While HiL technologies have been used for many years in fields such as automotive and aircraft engineering, they have so far only rarely been applied in process engineering.
“HiL has hardly been used in process engineering because both the urgent need and robust dynamic models were lacking. With the energy transition, this need is emerging, and in HyControl we are developing the models required for it.”
Dr. Manuel Gräber
TLK Energy
The growing share of renewable energy not only makes dynamic plant operation increasingly useful; at the same time, alongside large centralized industrial plants, decentralized production facilities are becoming more important, directly coupled to local renewable energy sources such as wind or solar farms.
"Decentralized production plants will play a much greater role in the energy system of the future. Our 5 MW electrolyzer in containerized design serves exactly this purpose. We see great potential in more advanced control technology to increase the load flexibility of our modular plant."
Dr. David Jasper
NEUMAN & ESSER
A key focus of the project is the development of new control concepts for electrolyzers that produce hydrogen from renewable electricity.
Within the project, Jülich’s Institute of Energy Technologies (IET) is working on corresponding control approaches to enable electrolyzers to better adapt to fluctuating energy supply.
“In addition to advances in materials research, future electrolyzers should become increasingly capable of following fluctuations in energy supply. To achieve this, we need intelligent operational management concepts as well as control units that can respond to the dynamics of renewable energy.”
Prof. Ralf Peters
Forschungszentrum Jülich (IET-4)
In addition to hydrogen production, the project also investigates the coupling of electrolysis processes with the synthesis of chemical hydrogen carriers, for example methanol.
This requires combining two processes in a flexible way:
In the future, both processes must be able to follow fluctuations in the supply of renewable energy.
"Here, we need complex control and automation technology that we want to develop and demonstrate.”
Dr. Urs Christen
Forschungszentrum Jülich (INW-4)
In the project, TLK Energy contributes its expertise in the modeling and simulation of thermal and process engineering systems. As part of HyControl, dynamic models are being developed that represent real operating conditions and can be used in hardware-in-the-loop test rigs.
These models make it possible to test new control and automation strategies at an early stage and to accelerate the development of future plants.
Several partners from research and industry are involved in the HyControl research project:
A central component of HyControl is the development of dynamic simulation models that reproduce the behavior of real plants with sufficient accuracy. For hardware-in-the-loop applications, however, these models must not only be physically accurate, but also run robustly and in real time.
To this end, physics-based models built on the Process Systems Library (PSL) are combined with simplified modeling approaches and validated using real plant data. For example, the simulations represent the behavior of electrolyzers as well as downstream chemical processes such as methanol synthesis, and can later be used in hardware-in-the-loop test rigs.
The developed models are coupled with real automation technology. The hardware-in-the-loop simulator generates typical industrial signals and interfaces, such as Profinet, Profibus, or 4–20 mA signals, and transmits them to real control units such as programmable logic controllers (PLCs). This makes it possible to investigate on a hardware-in-the-loop test rig how control and automation systems respond to dynamic process conditions, without having to work directly on a real plant.
Another key focus of the project is the development of end-to-end control systems that enable communication down to the field level. Among other things, already available technologies and communication protocols are being investigated, such as Ethernet-APL and the Modular Type Package (MTP). The aim is to facilitate the integration of plant modules from different manufacturers and to enable bidirectional communication with field devices.
This makes it easier, for example, to read out the condition data of individual components. That opens up new possibilities for the remote operation of plants as well as for condition-based maintenance concepts. At the same time, the project is investigating how existing field devices can be extended into intelligent field devices through suitable sensor-actuator combinations, enabling them to provide additional information about the condition of the plant.
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