Experimental Setup for the Evaluation of Optimization Strategies for Flexible Energy Resources

To counteract the intermittence of renewable energy generation, flexible energy resources can shift their energy consumption to times of abundant renewable energy availability. A high flexibility potential lies within industrial production facilities. To exploit this potential, optimization strategies can be employed to determine the optimal time and rate of production. While many optimization strategies have been proposed, only a small fraction of strategies are evaluated on real production resources. Therefore, this work proposes an experimental setup to evaluate optimization strategies before deploying them in an industrial production facility. The experimental setup consists of an experimental distillation unit, an optimization model to generate optimized operating schedules, and a simulation model of the distillation unit to test optimized schedules before running them on the real distillation unit. The development of the two models is described, and a case study is conducted to minimize the electricity costs of operating the real distillation unit. The models show good agreement with experimental results. The optimized schedule is executed by the distillation unit with an RMSE of less than 2%. The final production volume deviates from the optimized schedule by 2.4%.