  When simulators are energetically coupled in a co-simulation, residual
energies alter the total energy of the full coupled system. This distorts the
system dynamics, lowers the quality of the results, and can lead to
instability. By using power bonds to realize simulator coupling, the
Energy-Conservation-based Co-Simulation method (ECCO) [Sadjina et al. 2016]
exploits these concepts to define non-iterative global error estimation and
adaptive step size control relying on coupling variable data alone. Following
similar argumentation, the Nearly Energy Preserving Coupling Element (NEPCE)
[Benedikt et al. 2013] uses corrections to the simulator inputs to
approximately ensure energy conservation. Here, we discuss a modification to
NEPCE for when direct feed-through is present in one of the coupled simulators.
We further demonstrate how accuracy and efficiency in non-iterative
co-simulations are substantially enhanced when combining NEPCE with ECCO's
adaptive step size controller. A quarter car model with linear and nonlinear
damping characteristics serves as a co-simulation benchmark, and we observe
reductions of the coupling errors of up to 98% utilizing the concepts discussed
here.
