Engineering a digital twin 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. In sailing yacht Zero, the goal is to recover 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 an absorption 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. This is why you must test heavily before building.

They modelled critical components and created a digital twin of the yacht's thermal architecture. This allowed them to map and test low-level control loops, automated valve switching, and safety cooling modes entirely in a virtual environment.

Bridging the gap wasn’t without its hurdles; however, through rigorous 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: