Understanding machines with Digital Twins

If you go to a manufacturing conference you can guarantee there will be at least one talk on how organisations can use digital to understand their machines. In a world of fine margins there is a growing need to utilise digital to understand how efficiently machines are performing, whether there is room to tweak performance or even look at how they are working together in a larger ecosystem. Enter Digital Twins.

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Digital Twins, What are they, and how can they benefit you?

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In its purest form, a digital twin is a digital replica of a real-world object or process. When you read that your mind might jolt to a 3D model of a car or maybe a digital avatar you create of yourself in a game. 

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Now imagine that the 3D virtual model of the car also had access to the live data from the car powered by sensors, that's a real Digital Twin. So as an engineer, you could see what is happening to the car as it is racing around the track. You could see if any parts of the car are overheating, how much throttle the driver is giving it and how much wear is left on the brake pads. 

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This mechanism for receiving real-world real-time updates is really powerful, not only in a racing environment but also in a manufacturing environment, when you can start to see how effectively your machines are running. If you take this one step further, you can also start to predict when things could potentially go wrong. Your digital display can show you a visualisation of your factory and not only highlight that one of your machines is running hot, but that it is a lot hotter than it should be running. It can also predict that if the machine continues to run at this temperature it will not only damage the product it is producing, it will also break. This allows you to pre-empt potential disaster and get an engineer in to fix the issue before the machine breaks completely. 

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The beauty of having a digital twin of a whole factory means you can remotely monitor and control those machines. Taking this to the next level you can have the whole factory virtualised in digital twin form, enabling you to set up simulations to see what the impact of changing certain settings might be.  If you increase the output of machine X, how will that impact machine Y and will that result in higher production? Or will there be parts of the production line that will malfunction? All without wasting product or risking damage to machines. 

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As a mechanism for system management, Digital Twins are very much becoming part of the fabric of manufacturing. As a business dedicated to humanising information, at Elixel we see this as an opportunity to create experiences that bring machine data to life in a way that truly empowers people to make informed decisions. It's an exciting future ahead.

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