Developer Options Form
The Developer options form offers advanced users the possibility to make additional settings of the component that are not necessary for normal use. The prerequisite for using these options is the appropriate expert knowledge.
The Developer options form is located under the Notes and tooltip tab. For special cases, read the tooltips of the identifiers thoroughly. The following development settings occur repeatedly in the components.
Energy Converters
Energy converting components can contain the efficiency, result values, and initialization in the Developer options.
Define Efficiency Externally
Experts can optionally remove the physical correlation of the energy conversion in some components, e.g., the Gas Turbine, if this is to be mapped with components of the Programmable Control. To do this, select the Constant efficiency setting in the Technical input data form, and place a check mark next to Define efficiency externally in the Developer options form (see the following figure). Then the entered efficiency is only used to calculate the nominal states, but the relation between produced and consumed power, i.e., electrical power and fuel power, is removed. This can be useful if components of the programmable control specify different efficiency characteristics the use of which depends, for example, on the air temperature or the operation of another component.
Operating and Full Load Hours
For components such as the Gas Turbine or Hot Water Boiler, initialization and result values of full load and operating hours are located on the Development options form. TOP-Energy calculates the annual Operating and Full load hours during the simulation and shows them in h/a in the Technical output data. The reinvestment costs can depend on the number of total full load hours, for example, if a reinvestment payment is due after 20,000 full utilization hours (VBh), which must be taken into account in the Variant comparison. Normally, TOP-Energy assumes that the component is new at the beginning of the simulation. If a component has already completed a certain number of full load hours, you can enter the Full load hours and Operating hours as initialization values in the Development options.
Demand Components
Initialization values can be entered under the Developer options in the Demand components as for the energy converting components.
Tariff Components
The Tariff components have Developer options. In the bidirectional tariffs, e.g., Electricity Tariff, there are settings for the mathematical description of the model. In some special cases, it may help to use a different formulation here to fix numerical problems in the optimization calculation.
