Digital Twin: What Is This Technology?

The Digital Twin is progressing among the technologies developed around Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT). This is a promising concept nowadays. It offers numerous possibilities for improving the performance of products, anticipating the stages of their life cycle, or even planning the activities of an entire production chain. 

What is a Digital Twin?

Digital Twin is virtual replicas of physical objects. Prediction models build it. Artificial intelligence techniques such as machine learning and deep learning have made this possible. It remains closely linked to the replicated object despite being in virtual space in the form of sophisticated 3D modeling.

Virtual replicas are composed of many simulations based on different scientific fields (aerodynamics, thermal, electromagnetism, geophysics, soil science, chemistry, and biology).

How Does a Digital Twin work?

The Digital Twin analyzes, designs, feeds, and updates the physical object, equipped with distributed sensors, by sending a mass of accurate data. Since the physical object reacts and evolves like this in reality throughout its life cycle, this must be as faithful as possible.

The digital twin will help you to understand reality and its complexity in a more efficient way. This helps us to intervene in reality or make changes if necessary.

The Objectives of the Digital Twin

As many people as possible can use all these simulations, components, and data aggregations more easily. Thanks to 3D modelling’s visual and synthetic side. It is possible to conduct numerous digital tests before building a physical object using a virtual twin.

With the Digital Twin, virtual tests are performed to gain efficiency and speed, making the right decisions for the real world for much less money. This leads to an optimized design of the object according to the objectives set, whether in terms of durability, performance, safety or profitability.

The Advantages of the Digital Twin

The Digital Twin has its share of advantages, namely:

• Extending the life of an object by simulating its behaviour and its interactions with the environment.
• Carrying out predictive maintenance during the operating phase, thanks to the knowledge of breakdowns upstream of reality.
• An accelerated adaptation of a company to market demands.
• The follow-up of the progress of the production until the exploitation and the validation of its feasibility and the needs around the product in the event of new constraints.

Sectors of Use of Digital Twin

Digital Twin have truly revolutionized the industrial world by changing the development phase of a product or the use of equipment.

Digital Twin in health service

Computer modelling of human body organs helps simplify clinical trials, assist surgeons, or test new molecules. These virtual doubles are designed by relating the biological characteristics of a patient, such as a volume and architecture of organs, the microstructure of tissues, cell types and even the molecular level.

The objective is to simulate any medical act (treatment, surgery, etc.) on this copy to predict potential side effects and accelerate the development of the appropriate treatment.

Digital Twin in the automotive sector

The concept of a vehicle’s Digital Twin is a process that makes it possible to represent all of its technical characteristics and all the parameters related to its operation in digital form:

• journeys made,
• usage time,
• consumption,
• technical issues,

Everyone in the automotive sector (manufacturers, equipment manufacturers, etc.) massively supports the digitization of their products and services, with the aim of being able to create their Digital Twin.

Conclusion

A digital reinvention is taking place in companies, which are modifying their manufacturing models. Digital Twin have a bright future ahead of them, as incremental amounts of cognitive power are assiduously directed into their use. Thus, the Digital Twin immutably imbibes new skills and functionalities, which implies that they continue to generate the data necessary to improve products and make processes more efficient.

Find out how the change will impact your industry with solutions from Talend.

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