What is A Digital Twin?
In essence, a Digital Twin is a simulated clone of a physical object, or objects. This twin could be at the atomic scale for chemists, all the way up to cities, countries and more.
With Construction, Health and Infrastructure projects all becoming more complicated & time sensitive, it’s not practical to test long term cases using traditional models. Enter ‘Digital Twins’, a powerful concept of creating a virtual representation of a real world product, allowing pressure points and failures to be predicted and detected.
How Digital Twins Work
In order to accurately simulate the physical object Digital Twins usually rely on IoT devices (Internet of Things), which provide sensor data, such as temperature, pressure, accelerometer direction, and gas levels. Not dissimilarly to those found on your smartphone, or appliances at home. This creates feedback which helps ML(Machine Learning) models predict parts that are going to wear down, potential bottlenecks in production, or lifesaving information that could otherwise not have been gleaned.
A Brief History
Before Digital Twins existed, physical twins and scale models have often been used to simulate constructs to resolve issues. A great example of this is the Apollo 13 mission; when critical issues arose, scientists on earth were able to simulate the issue, and find solutions. NASA is also commonly held to be the initiator of the Digital Twin’s creation and evolution, with sources pointing to John Vickers coining the term in 2002. Later that year, Dr. Michael Grieves held a lecture on the subject at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, bringing it into the public’s attention.
Real World Examples
Digital Twin’s have potential to massively impact nearly every vertical, frequently being implemented with IoT and AI.
Construction
Singapore has already produced a 3D twin of the entire city allowing new buildings to be modelled and tested in near real world conditions, without expensive planning. The concept also allows for virtual experiments, with analysable results, and even having nearby construction projects collaborate and effectively plan their projects in combination.
In future, the city is looking to release portions of the data to local business, to feed information for further use such as navigation for driverless cars or ideal placement of solar panels with the city based on sun position.
Medical
Everyone knows how important their heart is, and much like your fingerprint, every heart is unique. The Living Heart Project is able to scan the human heart, and create a Digital Twin, and then use XR to explore from the view of a surgery, or within the veins and arteries. This is a huge boon for surgeons, able to simulate a surgery, before even making their first incision.
Transport & Aviation
Aircraft Maintenance is possibly the largest issue facing the aviation industry today. General Electric, Boeing, SpaceX and others have already looked to Digital Twin Technology to improve reliability of parts by analysing wear using a hybrid of IoT sensors onboard to feedback to Twins, and simulation of lifetime wear during first build to increase reliability, seeing up to a 40% improvement in part quality, and therefore airplane reliability.
In military application, 75% of military air force executives have cast a vote of confidence in favour of utilising Digital Twins, with many already investigating the full reach of the technology.
The motor industry is already buzzing about the future of self driving, electric cars, and as we have seen above with Singapore, the data provided can already assist with making self-driving a solid future technology. Combine digital cities with the improved reliabilities found in the Aviation and Aerospace industries, and you can see how Digital Twin Tech can improve the lives of car and van drivers everywhere.
Infrastructure
A Digital Twin is underway of the UK’s infrastructure[1], aiding national infrastructure projects of all magnitudes. A spokesperson for the project stated
“The UK has a chance to be a world leader in digital and artificial intelligence technologies, which could bring enormous benefits to our infrastructure network and people’s everyday lives.”
What this project will deliver is currently up to the usual governmental red tape, but just some of the potential outcomes of the project include:
- Increasing reliability of the UK’s Rail network by sensing issues more quickly using IoT and ML
- Faster identification of leaks in the water network through data from smart water meters
- Increasing competition between mobile and broadband operators by sharing data on signal and connection speeds — helping to end intermittent services
My hometown of Bournemouth has already shown the implications of Digital Twinning during the first stages of the UK 5G trials. The data was needed, as 5G travels less far than 4G and is more easily interrupted by smaller objects, such as leaves and lamp posts. To see the quality of the data, just look at Bournemouth on Google Maps.
Energy
General Electric have created the revolutionary concept of ‘Digital Windfarms’, allowing for constant optimisation of sails and motors in real time, as their promotion filled video shows. Given the scale of the energy industry, and with climate changes ever increasing pressure to reduce emissions while industries continue to grow, twinning could be one of the key weapons in the fight against climate change.
Conclusion
While Digital Twin’s may only be peaking in the Gartner Tech hype curve. I believe this technology may be worth the hype it is given.
The technology has the potential to impact every vertical. Providing insights that could otherwise be tricky, or impossible, to discover. Combine this with other emerging techs: IoT, AI, ML, and hyper increases in productivity and quality are possible.
If you want to know how Digital Twins could help you, or have other emerging tech questions, get in contact with me on Linkedin
