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

Planning Composite Twins

Let's first understand a simple composite asset before we get into planning composite twins. We are all familiar with commercial aircraft. Companies such as Boeing and Airbus are major manufacturers of commercial aircraft. However, a commercial aircraft such as the Boeing 747-8 (see https://www.boeing.com/commercial/747/), which can seat up to 410 people and uses a GEnx-2B engine from General Electric Aviation, consists of as many as 6 million parts, manufactured by about 550 suppliers in as many as 30 countries. For more information, refer to https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2013-05-29-Boeing-Celebrates-Delivery-of-50th-747-8.

Figure 8.8 shows a simplified view of a composite asset such as a commercial aircraft. In turn, each major part of the aircraft consists of many sub-assemblies and individual parts. Figure 8.9 shows the jet engine of the aircraft. A single aircraft such as a Boeing 747-8 would have four jet engines on the wings at any time. Note...