Digital Twin – Rise of New Era

The advancement in the technology and Internet has paved the way in bridging the digital and Physical world in Industrial 4.0. It is being echoed by many of the Industry leaders that this is going to Phase change the Manufacturing process which offers new ways to reduce costs, monitor assets, optimize maintenance, reduce downtime and enable the creation of connected products.

Digitization or Digital transformation is the key to this new era, as in the last few decades digitization has changed our lives and business in every forms. The advancements in Information Technology, Data Management and Analytics has enabled the possibilities of Digitization. The current acceleration however made possible only with Internet of things (IoT) and the lowering costs of technologies that boosted both IoT and the digital twin.

Digital twin refers to a digital replica of physical assets, processes and systems that can be used for various purposes. Digital twin has its entire presence in the product development life cycle, right from the design phase to the deployment phase; organizations can have a complete digital foot print of their products. These “connected digital things” generate data in real time, and this helps businesses to better analyze and predict the problems in advance or give early warnings, prevent downtime, develop new opportunities and even plan better products for the future at lower costs by using simulations.

Digital Twin incorporates Big Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Internet of Things in Industry 4.0 and are predominantly used in the Industrial Internet of Things, engineering, and manufacturing business space.

How Does Digital Twin Work

Digital Twin is created by collecting and synthesizing data from various sources including physical data, manufacturing data, operational data to create physical assets. The received data are integrated into a physical-based virtual model with the right AI algorithms. All the data from the system were captured and best possible analysis were done to get insights of the working model which in-turn optimize the system and serves live model of the physical equipment.

A digital twin is a living model that drives a business outcome (Colin J. Parris, GE)

What It Means for Finite Element Analysis

Simulations was traditionally used to support new product design, virtual testing and validation document for the existing design/products. But with the current expansion of Industrial Internet of things leads to expand the capability into operations. The IIOT enables engineers to communicate with sensors and capture data to monitor the performance, also analytics used to predict the performance in optimizing the product.

Digital twin has found its feet in Oil & Gas industry, with the help of Sensors, big data analytics and Simulation would help in replicating the virtual model of an oil rig. This is going to allow the operator to access the real time data from anywhere in the world, increase the operator efficiency through preventive and predictive maintenance.

“The creation of a digital guardian or twin of an offshore asset is a huge step forward for the oil and gas industry and will reap long-term benefits to enhance operational and cost-efficiencies as well as significantly reduce risk”, said Patrick O’Brien, CEO of ITF. “

Application of Digital Twin

Digital Twin has found his application in many of the sectors and few are quoted here for clarity.

• Manufacturing is set for major change with this upcoming technology, where this has significant impact in designing the product, maintaining, optimizing which in turn reduces the throughput times.
• Automobiles: Digital Twin finds its feet in developing virtual model of the connected vehicle, capture the behavior, operational data and analyzed, which helps in improving the vehicle performance for the connected vehicle.
• Retail: Digital Twins helps in better instore planning, security implementation and energy management in an optimized manner.
• Healthcare: Digital Twins along with data from IoT can play a key role in the health care sector from cost savings to patient monitoring, preventative maintenance and providing personalized health care.
• Industrial IoT: Industrial firms with digital twin implementation can now monitor, track and control industrial systems digitally. Apart from the operational data, the digital twins capture environmental data such as location, configuration, financial models etc. which helps in predicting the future operations and anomalies