The Digital Twin of your Fermenter - Part 1
Author: Magnus Valmot , Simon Riley
Digital Twins - Enabling Smart Fermentors
Introduction
The concept of the digital twin was described by Michael Grieves while working at the University of Michigan in 2002, where he presented a concept to the industry where the physical space of products and production would meet the virtual space. In this mirroring, the digital space would contain all the information about the physical space and vice versa. Remember: this was just a few years after the Internet of Things was first mentioned, and in the 20+ years that have passed, what were once theoretical concepts have since become “business as usual”.
Today, the digital twin has taken many forms.
From tracing the individual components finding their way into a jet engine (descriptive), tracking vibrations in a wind turbine (informative) to simulating the complex performance of a nuclear reactor based on available data capture (predictive).?
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Fermentation = PLAATO
At PLAATO, we help our customers get a detailed understanding of their fermentation, a key process happening behind stainless steel walls. The industry standard for fermentation monitoring has been manual data collection, which is both tedious and time-consuming. As a result, we see that most breweries will collect five to six samples per week. So process monitoring is intermittent, prone to human error and the data is often logged in unstructured ways. So almost the opposite of the promises made by the digital twin.
Digital Fermentor Vessels
The first step PLAATO has taken to build the digital twin of fermenter vessels is to upgrade the fermenters with smart sensors. We call it the PLAATO Pro, and in just minutes our customers upgrade a fermenter to a smart fermenter. The PLAATO Pro captures the main parameters that must be monitored during fermentation: liquid density, temperature, and fermentation activity.
Conclusion
From there, a world of opportunity opens up. By enriching the fermentation data with metadata connected to the recipe at hand, the ingredients being used or re-used and statistical data from our global data set of fermentations – your digital twin starts turning data into everyday decision support, and that’s what it’s all about! Stay tuned for part 2