Engineering a simulation for a 5 MWh zero-emission yacht

When you eschew fossil fuels, you become open to all other types of energy — especially ones that yacht designers historically don’t utilise.

This is how sailing yacht Zero used a digital twin to fully embrace thermal energy.

Firstly, around 50 % of a yacht’s energy usage goes towards HVAC when at anchor, and the team wanted to find ways to reduce this. So, on sailing yacht Zero, the goal is to use a heat-fired chiller to reduce reliance on HVAC.

This is done by recovering waste heat from the power converters and the thrusters (which produce 4.3 kW forward and 9 kW aft) and the PVT panels. This is stored in phase-change materials and is also used to drive the heat-fired chiller.

The question, of course, is how do you make sure this works? For that, the team looked to build a real-time capable digital twin using the Modelica Standard and XRG HVAC libraries.

After all, you don’t want to risk damage to such a high-stakes project. Nor do you want to run into any blockers on the way. This is why you must test heavily before building.

Therefore, the team modelled critical components and created a model of the yacht's thermal system. This allowed them to map and test low-level control loops, automated valve switching, and safety cooling modes entirely in a virtual environment. With the idea being that the higher level intelligence can then build on top of all that and still be testable.

Bridging the gap wasn’t without its hurdles; however, through rigorous and automated testing they ensured no broken logic entered the system.

With the high-temperature systems successfully simulated, the next step comes in testing it out in real-world conditions. Best of all, the entire project is open-source, meaning the entire maritime industry can benefit from these learnings.

For more information, watch the full presentation below from Boudewijn van Groos: