Digital Twins: Monitoring Manufacturing Components in Real Time

Digital twins are transforming the way organizations use data, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the manufacturing sector.

In smart manufacturing,?the advantages and benefits of using digital twins?are rapidly coming to fruition. From anticipating maintenance issues to evaluating product upgrades and informing financial decisions, digital twins give companies the predictive insights to achieve their business goals.

For example, digital twin technology in manufacturing allows for virtual commissioning, which enables early validation of system designs to predict and solve problems that happen when machines and processes are integrated for the first time.

In smart manufacturing, digital twin technology shows how entire systems will interact — not just individual devices, but how each device will influence the performance of an entire production floor.

According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s?Kaizen philosophy of continuous improvement, in the world of manufacturing, digital twins provide the decision-making insights factories need to run Lean. As they seek to eliminate waste, manufacturers turn to quantitative insights from digital twins.

This is especially apparent with manufacturing equipment that’s outfitted with sensors such as a machine with an electric motor and a driveshaft, outfitted with a vibration sensor, temperature sensor, and rpm meter. These devices all feed real-time data into a digital twin of the machine.?Benefits from this arrangement include:

• Real-time observation.?A trigger programmed into the digital twin alerts maintenance techs if the vibration level, temperature, or rpms exceed a specific threshold. This incites real-time action to prevent long-term damage.
• Historical data.?The motor suddenly fails. During a root cause analysis, the maintenance tech reviews digital twin data and sees that rpms spiked several times before the failure, and the temperature rose dramatically moments before failure.
• Preventive maintenance.?Maintenance techs integrate the digital twin data with a CMMS platform. The CMMS schedules routine service based on average component lifespans and manufacturer-recommended service schedules.

Want to learn more? Tonex offers Digital Twins in Manufacturing, a 2-day course where participants learn the principles of Digital Twins and how it relates to integration of Digital Engineering, modeling and simulations, AI/ML, 3D and integration for service and product-related data and systems.

Learn how Digital Twins can help in the manufacturing sector. Also learn how a Digital Twin creates the virtual model of physical entity in digital way, promotes the interaction and integration of physical world and information world, and builds a reliable bridge for industrial information integration.

For more information, questions, comments,?contact us.