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

Identifying a Digital Twin platform

In Chapter 3, Identifying the First Digital Twin, we looked at the evaluation of a Digital Twin from the perspective of various kinds of companies. The first and second types were large industrial companies, who could be a manufacturer of an industrial asset. Here, we will expand into such considerations from those such as an industrial manufacturer who would be interested in improving a product and providing good maintenance services, over the life of an asset, to its customers or operators of the asset.

The perspective of the asset owner

Let's narrow things down to the energy sector and the manufacturer of wind turbines. Global warming and the use of renewable sources of energy are on the rise. Hence, we believe wind turbines will continue to become an important industrial asset in the energy sector. A horizontal-axis wind turbine (HAWT), such as the one shown in the following figure, is the most commonly used type of wind turbine....