Digital twin and digital thread

As they prove to be useful in orchestrating and optimizing physical and digital processes across factories and the entire product value chain, the concepts of digital twin and digital thread are swiftly expanding in the digital market.

The digital twin and digital thread are not similar concepts. Both these concepts help in understanding the actual working of the physics-based models by reflecting the exact operating conditions like performance and failure modes, but their application and functioning is different from one another. Let’s take a detailed look at both of these concepts.

What is a Digital Twin?

The main goal of a digital twin is to create, build, and test your equipment in a virtual environment. Only when you get to understand your product’s functionality, and how it performs to your requirements, would you physically manufacture it. Digital twin comprises of several elements like manufacturing simulations, 3D CAD models, and real-time data feeds from sensors that are incorporated into the physical operating environment. Digital twin can benefit all aspects of manufacturing, right from design to real-time data feed. The aim of creating a digital twin is not just to cut prototyping or construction costs, but also to predict failures more easily and accurately and effectively, thereby reducing both maintenance costs and downtime. For example, the digital twin created for a wind farm helps in informing the manufacturer about the configuration of each wind turbine prior to procurement and construction.

Benefits of Digital Twin

The expected benefits of creating a digital twin for a product include:

• An effective assessment of your system’s current and future capabilities during its entire lifecycle.
• Detection of system performance deficiencies by simulating results prior to development of physical processes and the product
• Optimization of internal processes, such as operability, inspectability, manufacturability, sustainability, implementing models, and simulations applied during the entire lifecycle of the product.
• On-going refinement in designs and models is possible with help of a digital twin as it allows data to be easily cross-referenced to design details.

What is a Digital Thread?

The digital thread consists of a communication framework that helps in facilitating an integrated view and connected data flow of the product’s data throughout its lifecycle. The digital thread concept helps in delivering the right information at the right time and at the right place. Digital thread provides the ability of accessing, integrating, analyzing, and transforming data from disparate systems into actionable information throughout the product lifecycle. By developing digital thread, product engineers can collaborate with manufacturing engineers for creating a 3D model linked to visuals for production process instructions.

Benefits of Digital Thread

The expected benefits of creating a digital thread for a product include:

• The digital thread helps in reducing costs by enabling the use of cloud services, thereby allowing manufacturers to generate and enhance measurement solutions, select appropriate machines and cutters, and optimize the manufacturing schedule.
• The digital thread also facilitates scientific shop floor control that can help your company to manufacture faster when the schedule is tight.
• Implementation of real-time measurements with digital thread helps in the effective delivery of digital data for simulation and digital assembly.
• The digital thread helps in enhancing the product so that planners, designers, and machinists can easily share results and see each other’s solutions.

The concept of digital twin and digital thread helps in creating a virtual copy, running in the cloud for every physical asset, thereby making that asset enhanced and accurate by feeding it with operational data every second.