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

Technical evaluation considerations

Our Digital Twin is expected to reflect the current condition of our physical asset, which is a wind turbine in a wind farm. In our case, we ensured that the DTDL of the different sub-assemblies of the wind turbine contained the data elements necessary for our goal, which is predictive maintenance of the wind turbine when operating in the farm. Referring to Figure 6.25, we can see attributes such as the gearbox oil level, the oil temperature, and the bearing temperature are captured in the DTDL elements for the gearbox.

Figure 6.25 – Example data elements of the wind turbine's gearbox

Figure 6.24 shows the ability to visually display attributes such as the gearbox oil viscosity via the visualization application of the Digital Twin over a specific time interval. Since gearbox oil condition monitoring is a common practice in the industry for wind turbines, this helps to connect the dots between the Digital Twin...