How Digital Twin Technology benefits manufacturing in Industry 4.0

What is a Digital Twin?

A digital twin is basically a digital representation of an industrial function or physical space.

Essentially, it takes data collected by industrial sensors (IoT) and monitoring software to generate a visualization of processes. In the era of Industry 4.0, digital twins help bridge the gap between the physical as well as digital worlds.

At a high level, digital twins involve three things:

1. Physical entity
2. Digital replica
3. The data connection between the above two entities.

By completely visualizing an environment with actionable real-time data, companies who utilize digital twins have an opportunity to monitor current concerns as well as explore more future opportunities without updating anything in their current physical space.

How Digital Twin Technology is Used in Manufacturing?Improving System Designs

Manufacturers can analyze potential problems and areas to optimize before they generate the physical system, saving time and money. Also, warehouse designs can be planned more simply and efficiently with digital twins. Digital twin visualization techniques can make concerns much more visible.

Testing New Products

With digital twins, manufacturers can test out upgraded configurations while minimizing the risk of costly mistakes. Simulating several different scenarios is quicker and easier than physical testing.

Preventative Maintenance

Manufacturers have long been collecting essential data about their machinery, such as humidity, motion, vibration, etc. Now, with IoT-connected and digital twins, this data can be incorporated into a whole view of a system, complete with real-time data. If any issue arises in the development of a component, teams will be aware of it before it has the chance to stop production or become a threat.

Eliminate Paper

With digital twins, plant managers can manage a number of things to manage efficiency. Improve productivity by optimizing ineffective workflows by finding and resolving the root cause of several concerns in your plants’ processes.

Digital Twin for Shop Floor Workers

Increased visibility of real-time data will help shop floor workers to analyze production bottlenecks quickly.

Improved data visualization reduces risk and changes into quality improvements.

Digital twin technology helps Industry 4.0 technologies, helping to improve OEE, reducing waste, increasing batch changeover times and also product quality, increasing traceability, and more.

How Does Digital Twin Technology Work?

A digital twin includes three main elements:

1. Past data — historical performance data of individual machines, overall processes, and specific systems.
2. Real-time data — Real-time data from various sensors, outputs from manufacturing platforms and systems, and also outputs from systems throughout the distribution chain.
3. Future data — machine learning and inputs from engineers.

Applications:

• Utilizing predictive maintenance to maintain equipment, production lines, as well as facilities.
• Getting a clear understanding of products by analysing them in real-time as they are utilized by real customers or end-users
• Manufacturing process optimization
• Improving product traceability processes
• Improving the level of integration between unconnected systems
• Remote troubleshooting of equipment, in spite of geographical location

The Future of Digital Twins

As manufacturers gather more data, it will be possible to leverage digital twins to model potential production scenarios to choose the best possible plan of action.

For Industries and organizations that already utilize IoT, digital twins are the next step along the digital journey. They can be utilized to increase efficiencies, optimize processes, detect concerns before they occur, and pioneer for the future. Kneo Automation will help you to produce not only better business outcomes but also better outcomes for everyone, contact us today.

Mrs. Shinde Seo and Digital Marketing Kneo Automation Pvt Ltd