“Digital twin is a digital representation of a physical entity that helps in tracking and modifying the activities of the object real-time”.
Concept of Digital Twin
“Digital Twin is a virtual representation of a physical object, used to understand and predict the activity of its physical counterpart. Digital Twin technology is used throughout a product’s life cycle to track, predict, and optimize the product and the system before investing in the assets.”
The term digital twin was first coined by Dr.Michael Grieves in the year 2002. However, this concept was anticipated by David Gelernter in 1991 in his book, Mirror Worlds.
Digital twin consists of three distinct parts:
- Physical Product
- Virtual Product
- The connection between the physical and virtual products
Types of Digital Twin
There are three types in which we can segregate digital twins -
Digital Twin Prototype (DTP)
DTP consists of the analysis, design, and process to perceive the physical product.
Digital Twin Instance (DTI)
DTI is the digital twin of an individual instance of a product after it is manufactured.
Digital Twin Aggregate (DTA)
DTA is the aggregation of DTIs whose data and information can be used for interrogation about the physical product, prognostics, and learning.
Introduction
Digital twin technology is a concept where the physical and virtual world meet, where every industrial product is bound to get a complete digital impression of itself. These connected digital entities generate data in real-time and help organizations predict their problems and fix them in advance. This concept helps the organization plan and design their products better. Digital twins play a major role in delivering products for better customer experience. The data is analyzed using connected sensors, combined with other sources of information to make the predictions.
How Digital Twin technology helps the industry:
Digital Twin technology is a live model that is utilized to drive business results, and can be executed by manufacturing industries for numerous reasons:
- Visualizing products in use, by real users, in real-time
- Building a digital thread, connecting different systems, and promoting trace-ability
- Clarifying assumptions with predictive analytics
- Troubleshooting distant equipment
- Managing complexities and linkage within systems of systems.
The idiosyncrasy of Digital Twin
Connectivity
The significant trait of Digital Twin is its connectivity. The digital twin associates the physical item and its virtual partner. The idea of IoT makes connectivity conceivable. The connectivity in digital twins is made by sensors on the physical items that get the information, coordinate and convey through different advances. This trademark enables the association to remain associated with the products and its clients.
Homogenization
The digital twin is an advanced innovation that goes about as both the circumstances and logical results of the homogenization of information. Because of the way that any kind of data or substance can be put away and transmitted in the equivalent computerized structure, it very well may be utilized to make a virtual portrayal of the item, accordingly decoupling the data from its physical structure. In this manner, the homogenization of information and the decoupling of the data from its physical antiquity, have permitted digital twins to appear. In any case, digital twins likewise empower progressively more data on physical items to be put away carefully and become decoupled from the item itself.
As information is progressively digitized, it tends to be transmitted, put away and figured in quick and minimal effort ways. As indicated by Moore's law, registering force will keep on expanding exponentially over the coming years, while the expense of figuring diminishes altogether. This would, along these lines, lead to bring down minimal expenses of creating computerized twins and make it similarly a lot less expensive to test, foresee, and take care of issues on virtual portrayals as opposed to testing on physical models and trusting that physical items will break before mediating.
Digital twin innovation permits itemized data about a physical article to be imparted to a bigger number of specialists, unconstrained by physical area or time. In his white paper on advanced twin innovation in the assembling business, Michael Grieves noticed the accompanying about the results of homogenization empowered by digital twins
Re-programmable
Digital twin innovation permits physical items to be re-programmable. Digital twins can be utilized to gather information about the presentation of the motor and if necessary modify the motor, making a more current form of the item. Additionally, servitization can be viewed as a result of the re-programmable nature too. Producers can be responsible for tracking the digital twin, making alterations, or reinventing the digital twin when required and they can offer this as an additional help.
Digital Traces
Another characteristic of digital twin technology is that it leaves digital traces. These traces can be used by engineers to improve their designs so that these same malfunctions will occur less often in the future. For example, when a machine malfunctions to go back and check the traces of the digital twin, to diagnose where the problem occurred. These diagnoses can in the future also be used by the manufacturer of these machines.
Modularity
In the perception of the manufacturing industry, modularity can be depicted as the structure and customization of items and create modules. By adding particularity to the manufacturing industry, makers gain the capacity to change models and machines. digital twin innovation empowers producers to follow the machines that are utilized and notice potential territories of progress in the machines. At the point when these machines are made particular, by utilizing digital twin innovation, producers can see which segments cause the machine to perform ineffectively and supplant these with better fitting segments to improve the manufacturing procedure.
Gartner has estimated that the use of digital twins will triple by 2022, so where is the technology best suited in manufacturing?
Companies use Digital Twin technology to improve ongoing operations, train employees and to test new products or procedures before launching them to the real world where it becomes more expensive and complicated to fix any issues.
Applications of Digital Twin Technology
The digital twin technology proved to produce a virtual replica of physical products with 99.98% accuracy that is applicable across different fields which helps the organizations enhance their customer experience.
Design: The design phase is used for simulation and visualization of a product to verify the 3D design and to ensure if all the parts fit together. Simulations include mechanical, thermal and electrical as well as interrelationships between these aspects.
System Integration: Using 3 Dimension visualization at the system level the constraints such as spatial footprint and physical connection can be verified. The systems connect to the digital twin of the other component for simulation, data transfer, and other control functionalities.
Diagnostics: In 3 Dimension visualization, digital twin helps in troubleshooting. Virtual reality glasses can furnish field specialists with an overlay over the genuine gear to envision parameters
Prediction: The condition of the equipment can be tracked using the past and present data with predictive algorithms to provide insights about the equipment. This helps the organization plan its maintenance.
Advanced services: In the event that all the propelled administration parameters (IoT network, investigation calculations, and so on) are preconfigured in the advanced twin, they can be empowered when the hardware is introduced and the client buys into these administrations. In the ideal case, no further building is required.
A Digital twin backings and expels vulnerability during structure and setup while supporting applications and guaranteeing accessibility and unwavering quality through condition observing and propelled administrations.
The Digital twin technology was first adopted by NASA to monitor the activities of the machines in outer space as it is impossible to be physically present. It proved vital during the failure of the Apollo 13 mission.
7 classic applications of Digital Twin Technology (Source: Forbes)
Forbes has classified 7 different field examples where the digital twin technology is up and running successfully:
- NASA used pairing technology, the precursor to digital twin technology, from the earliest days of space exploration to solve the issue of operating, maintaining and repairing systems when you aren’t near them physically.
- At the Spring Festival Gala aired on China Central Television, the four human hosts were joined by an AI copy of themselves—their very own digital twin created by ObEN.
- Digital twin technology has even been deployed to refine Formula 1 car racing.
- There is even a digital twin of Singapore! Imagine all the variables that go into the management of a city.
- Chevron expects to save millions of dollars in maintenance costs from the digital twin technology they will have deployed on equipment by 2024 in oil fields and refineries.
- Similar to the benefits of manufacturing, digital twins can revolutionize healthcare operations as well as patient care. A digital twin of a patient or organs allows surgeons and health professionals to practice procedures in a simulated environment rather than on a real patient.
- Digital twin technology can help personnel get comfortable with the Internet of Things implementation and automation because they have the opportunity to simulate the application prior to it going live.
Benefits of Digital Twin Technology
By being able to control any system of systems from a distance through sensors, real-time, digital twin technology holds a variety of benefits throughout the life of a product.
Downtime reduction—The digital twin helps the organization to identify the issue in the system before it occurs helping reduce the downtime.
Inventory management—Identifying faults that develop in the system and get insights into what parts might need repair or replacement.
Fleet management—Managing similar products produced by the same manufacturer at different operating conditions such as temperature, pressure and other climatic conditions.
What if simulation—Monitoring the whole fleet and simulating the future scenario.
Operations planning—Making comparisons with the aim to increase the overall efficiency.
Increased reliability—Increases the reliability of the product by reducing the risk of failure and lowering the maintenance cost.
Improved customer experience—Customers can remotely configure the product and increase production.
Conclusion
Digital twin technology provides accurate results and its real-time monitoring makes it possible to be used in different fields to improve productivity, customer experience and enhance the business of any industry. This technology enables the physical component to be accessed remotely ahead of any failure that would occur in the system reducing the chances of failure. By 2022 digital twin technology is expected to be implemented in almost all the fields to improve quality.
We at TVS Next have broadened our horizons and have expanded our business into offering multiple new tech-based solutions, apps, and services - Digital Twins being one of them.