Supply Systems
Reference for the Supply systems panel: assign, exchange and remove supply systems on surface heating building components, system variants including FMU coupling
Overview
The Supply systems panel links building components with a configured surface heating to a supply system from the database. A supply system describes how the water-carrying pipe registers are supplied hydraulically — from the simple specification of constant supply conditions to the coupling to a user-defined network or an external supply FMU. On export to the simulation model, VICUS Buildings creates a separate hydraulic network for each used supply system, bundling all surface heating circuits connected to it.
Without an assigned supply system, a pipe register system is instead operated “ideally” with the heating/cooling curve stored in the surface heating element, see Ideal Heating / Surface Heating Calculation Model.
Access
In the Building view, select the Building mode in the property area on the right and expand the Supply systems page. As long as the panel is active, the 3D scene colors the surfaces according to the color of the assigned supply system; building components with an active layer but without a supply system appear blue.
Prerequisites
A supply system can only be assigned to building components that
- have an active layer and
- already have a surface heating assigned
(see Assigning Surface Heating). The Assign… button remains disabled as long as none of the building components selected in the scene meets both conditions; building components that do not meet them are skipped during assignment.
Table of used supply systems
The table Supply systems lists all supply systems currently assigned to visible surfaces — one row per system with a color field and name. If a building component references a supply system that no longer exists in the database, the gray-marked row “Invalid/missing supply system” appears.
Buttons for the marked table row:
Edit… opens the marked supply system in the database editor (also by double-clicking the row). Only active for valid systems.
Exchange… replaces the marked supply system with another one from the database — and does so on all building components in the project that use it, regardless of the current surface selection in the scene.
Select… selects all surfaces with the marked supply system in the 3D scene; also works for the “Invalid/missing supply system” row and is thus suitable for tracking down faulty assignments.
Assigning and removing
The lower area (“Select supply system(s):”) acts on the surfaces currently selected in the 3D scene:
Assign… opens the supply system database (identical to Databases > Supply systems…) and assigns the chosen system to all selected building components with an active layer and surface heating.- Remove deletes the supply system assignment of the selected building components; the surface heating and active layer are retained. The button is only active if at least one selected building component has a supply system.
Both actions are undoable.
System variants
The type of a supply system is defined in the database editor (see Usage Submodels). Four variants are available:
| Variant | Description |
|---|---|
| Stand-alone operation with given mass flow and supply temperature (StandAlone) | Constant specifications: maximum mass flow [kg/s] and supply temperature [°C]. On export, constant schedules for the pump and ideal generator of the generated hydraulic network are created from these. |
| User-defined network (SubNetwork) | References a network (sub-network) from the database with generator components. Their components can use heating curves from the database (Databases > Heating curves…). |
| Supply FMU loaded from a database and parametrized by the user (DatabaseFMU) | Intended for prefabricated supply FMUs from an FMU database. This variant is not yet fully supported in the current version; the database editor offers no input fields for it. |
| User-defined supply FMU (UserDefinedFMU) | Own FMU file (*.fmu); parametrized via maximum mass flow [kg/s] and heating power [kW]. |
For the variant with a user-defined FMU, the export defines FMI interface variables (including mass-flow and supply-temperature inputs) on the generated network, so that the building model can be coupled with the supply FMU in a co-simulation, see FMU Export & Co-Simulation.
Good to know:
A supply system is only necessary if you want to explicitly represent the hydraulic supply — for example to investigate a heat pump as a generator or for FMU coupling to an external system simulation. For classic heating-load and comfort considerations, the surface heating without a supply system is usually sufficient: the pipe register is then supplied ideally with the heating/cooling curve of the surface heating element, which keeps the simulation considerably leaner.