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What and Why of Digital Twin?
The digital twins are rapidly gaining traction in operational processes adaptive to the 4th Industrial Revolution; it is primarily used in manufacturing and built environment (smart cities) industries.
- Digital twins are bridging the gap between the physical and virtual, it is a virtual model designed to accurately reflect a physical object.
- The object being studied is outfitted with various sensors related to vital areas of functionality.
- These sensors produce data about different aspects of the physical object’s performance, such as energy output, temperature, weather conditions and more.
- This data is then relayed to a processing system and applied to the digital copy.
- It is a digital model of a physical asset that continuously collects information from the created environment (using sensors, drones, or other IoT and IIoT data collection tools) and applies advanced analytics, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI) to gain real-time insight into the performance, performance, or profitability of physical assets.
- Better R&D: The use of digital twins enables more effective research and design of products, with an abundance of data created about likely performance outcomes.
- Increased efficiency: Digital twins can help mirror and monitor production systems even after a new product has gone into production, with an eye to achieve and maintain peak efficiency throughout the entire manufacturing process.
- Product end-of-life: Digital twins can even help manufacturers decide what to do with products that reach the end of their product lifecycle and need to receive final processing, through recycling or other measures. They can determine which product materials can be harvested by using digital twins.
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Power-generation equipment: Large engines including jet engines, locomotive engines and power-generation turbines benefit tremendously from the use of digital twins, especially for helping to establish timeframes for regularly needed maintenance.
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Structures and their systems: Big physical structures, such as large buildings or offshore drilling platforms, can be improved through digital twins, particularly during their design. It would also be useful in designing the systems operating within those structures, such as HVAC systems.
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Manufacturing operations: Since digital twins are meant to mirror a product’s entire lifecycle, it’s not surprising that digital twins have become ubiquitous in all stages of manufacturing, guiding products from design to finished product, and all steps in between.
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Healthcare services: Just as products can be profiled through the use of digital twins, so can be the patients receiving healthcare services. The same type system of sensor-generated data can be used to track a variety of health indicators and generate key insights.
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Automotive industry: Cars represent many types of complex, co-functioning systems, and digital twins are used extensively in auto designing, both to improve vehicle performance and increase the efficiency surrounding their production.
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Urban planning: Civil engineers and others involved in urban planning activities are aided significantly by the use of digital twins, which can show 3D and 4D spatial data in real time and also incorporate augmented reality systems into built environments
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Role in smart cities: Digital twin can also play a major role in smart cities as they are the urban areas combining information and communication technology, sensors and other gadgets connected to internet of things to collect extensive data which can be used for optimisation of resources and services
- Monitoring of assets: Digital twin can help in monitoring the assets virtually thereby improving situation awareness and taking necessary measures
- Optimisation of processes: It uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, augmented reality and more to provide previously unknown information for optimising manufacturing and other business processes
- Testing through simulations: They also make the use of real time data to create realistic simulations allowing products, equipments and processes to be tracked and tested
- Improve performance: The IoT sensors in the physical assets of factories collect data and transfer it to the digital twin, the communication enabled improves the asset performance for better results
- The technology has made it possible to avoid unexpected down times and improved asset performance through information received from the sensors
- Better understanding of the products: the real time monitoring at the same time when customers use it, maintaining the assets in better way, optimisation of processes, testing, validating and improved integration between the systems have enabled manufacturers to understand the products in better manner
- Data security: according to estimates about 75% of digital data twins for IoT connected products would utilise at least five different kinds of integration and points by 2023
- The amount of data collected from these numerous end points would be huge and would represent a potential area of security vulnerability
- The areas of security importance include- data encryption, access to privileges and addressing known device vulnerabilities
- Data quality: the digital twin models depend on the data from the thousands of remote sensors communicating over unreliable networks
- Companies aiming to employment of the technology must be able to exclude bad data and manage gaps in the data streams
- Training: the uses of technology must adopt new ways of working which may potentially lead to problems in building new technical capabilities
- Organisations should ensure that, their staff should have adequate skills and tools to work with the digital twin models
- The digital twins have been an established reality of mini manufacturing businesses and the market is set to hit $15.66 billion by 2023
- The technology has made its place in real time monitoring with seemingly unending benefits and is truly revolutionary
- The pandemic has added more relevance to digital twin technology, since the digital age has a limitless potential and is transforming the way we live our lives
- It is crucial for India to develop digital capacities for more efficient and speedy growth of the country, though technology is still at a nascent stage, it opens new vistas of improvements and innovations
POSTED ON 08-01-2022 BY ADMIN
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