By Sarika Andhee. marketing leader, Field Services Anglophone Africa at Schneider Electric.
Digital twin technology is emerging as the unsung hero of facility maintenance and service, enabling organisations, their internal teams and external partners to truly stay one step ahead of potential downtime and even catastrophic failure.
Sarika Andhee.
In fact, research group, Gartner has identified digital twin technology as one of the top trends shaping the industrial equipment and process manufacturing industries. But to contextualise digital twin technology’s importance in facility maintenance, it’s important that we take one step back.
Neglected maintenance of facilities increases safety and financial risks, often causing unplanned outages that can lead to equipment damage, and worse, injuries to personnel. Equipment downtime and electrical outages cost manufacturing plants hundreds of thousands if not millions of rands. South Africa’s current volatile grid continues to reemphasise this bleak picture.
Unfortunately, in their efforts to mitigate downtime, equipment failure and outages, many engineers such as those working in the power systems domain are limited to working with static paper or PDF-based electrical single-line diagrams (SLDs), which are often outdated. These limitations increase the difficulty of properly maintaining and updating the electrical systems documentation and the resultant risk to operations.
It’s virtually real
Digital twin technology allows facility management teams to overcome the limitation of static representation by gaining deeper insight using dynamic, real-time simulation that is enhanced by intelligent data. A digital twin isn’t only limited to modelling real-time conditions, it can also run predictive simulations. For example, it can demonstrate the effect of adding an additional motor/load to the existing electrical reticulation and model the effects of that modification.
This is immensely valuable to maintenance teams who are responsible for staying one step ahead of any equipment problems and failures. Not only does it improve uptime, but it also helps the external service provider to provide maintenance and support to facilities.
Digital twins provide the following important benefits to maintenance teams:
• They allow ‘what if’ scenarios so that teams can simulate different situations and gain insight into the impact of a facility’s performance, without the risk of downtime and potential injury to personnel.
• They enable facility personnel to have an updated reference for their electrical single line diagram. This is critical for avoiding both equipment damage and injury to personnel operating the equipment. Having this single source of truth is necessary to ensure optimal performance.
• They have an interactive digital SLD that offers great value to maintenance teams as they can easily gain access to equipment documentation and datasheets.
• They can analyse new equipment and changes, and identify what impact they will have on a facility’s overall performance, helping teams to streamline diagnostics and make informed decisions on upgrades and modifications.
Next-generation predictive solutions such as digital twins that use real-time and archived data to act as a simulation platform are undoubtedly becoming an essential tool for maintenance teams. When provided with reliable, high-quality data, digital twins offer invaluable, real-time insights that enhance quality, performance and efficiency of facilities while adapting to ever-changing conditions and constraints. This technology is fast becoming an effective way to maintain a facility’s assets and reduce equipment and personnel risk.
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