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

Development process of our Digital Twin

Let's explore the development process of the Digital Twin. This will ensure that we have the skills to undertake such development.

Wind turbine as our Digital Twin prototype

We will use a wind farm as the example of our first Digital Twin prototype. We will focus on a simple model of a wind farm here. Our primary goal is to show how to create the first Digital Twin of the wind turbine in the book, rather than help build expertise on wind turbines or the renewables industry. We will create Digital Twin models and instances for each physical turbine in the wind farm. The Digital Twin models represent the basic elements of a wind turbine, and it is sufficient to address different use cases from a business value point of view.

The perspective for the wind farm and wind turbine Digital Twin is that of a wind turbine manufacturer who is also contracted by the operator to maintain the wind turbines to agreed service levels. Our use case...