Book Image

Building Industrial Digital Twins

By : Shyam Varan Nath, Pieter van Schalkwyk
Book Image

Building Industrial Digital Twins

By: Shyam Varan Nath, Pieter van Schalkwyk

Overview of this book

Digital twin technology enables organizations to create digital representations of physical entities such as assets, systems, and processes throughout their life cycle. It improves asset performance, utilization, and safe operations and reduces manufacturing, operational, and maintenance costs. The book begins by introducing you to the concept of digital twins and sets you on a path to develop a digital twin strategy to positively influence business outcomes in your organization. You'll understand how digital twins relate to physical assets, processes, and technology and learn about the prerequisite conditions for the right platform, scale, and use case of your digital twins. You'll then get hands-on with Microsoft's Azure Digital Twins platform for your digital twin development and deployment. The book equips you with the knowledge to evaluate enterprise and specialty platforms, including the cloud and industrial IoT required to set up your digital twin prototype. Once you've built your prototype, you'll be able to test and validate it relative to the intended purpose of the twin through pilot deployment, full deployment, and value tracking techniques. By the end of this book, you'll have developed the skills to build and deploy your digital twin prototype, or minimum viable twin, to demonstrate, assess, and monitor your asset at specific stages in the asset life cycle.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Section 1: Defining Digital Twins
4
Section 2: Building the Digital Twin
10
Section 3: Enhancing the Digital Twin
12
Interview on Digital Twins with William (Bill) Ruh, CEO of Lendlease Digital
13
Interview on Digital Twins with Anwar Ahmed, CTO - Digital Services at GE Renewable Energy

Defining the Twin of Twins

In this context, terms such as composite twins, twin of twins, and system of systems are often used. Let's use the example of the energy ecosystem to understand this concept. In the energy ecosystem, we look at the hierarchy as follows:

  • An energy value chain that will consist of a) generation, b) transmission, c) distribution, and d) consumption, as shown in Figure 8.1. The grid can have one or many generation sources.
  • Energy generation can be broadly divided into a) fossil fuel or non-renewable sources and b) renewable sources.
  • With renewable sources, we can look at a) wind, b) solar, and c) hydro.
  • Wind farms can be a) onshore (land) or b) offshore (water).
  • Each wind farm will often consist of several turbines.
  • Each wind turbine has several sub-systems or sub-assemblies and components.

Figure 8.1 – The energy value chain, including generation, transmission, and distribution

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