Digital twins play a crucial role in the aerospace industry, providing real-time insights into operations and assets. They enable data-driven decision-making, enhance safety, reduce costs, and optimise performance. Aerospace companies use digital twins for engineering improvements, data collection, smart manufacturing, and more, transforming the industry by unlocking new possibilities and efficiencies.
FREMONT, CA: A digital twin is a replica of physical processes, products, and systems, which can monitor and analyse real-time performance. They are created by gathering and analysing information from numerous sources, comprising sensors, actuators, and other devices which are connected to the monitored asset. The information is then used to generate a virtual model, or a ‘twin’, of the asset that can offer insights into the asset’s performance and behaviour.
Digital Twin in Aerospace
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A digital twin is a vital part of the aerospace industry, enabling businesses to gain real-time insights into their operations and assets. The technology allows for tracking performance, maintaining cycles, and other crucial aspects of any aircraft operation.
By presenting precise data on physical assets, digital twins enable aerospace organisations to make data-driven decisions quicker and with higher levels of precision. With the help of this capability, digital twins can provide numerous benefits when it comes to safety enhancement, cost reduction, and performance optimisation for aerospace operations.
As digital twins have become widely popular in the industry, it has turned into a trend in aerospace and defence applications, specifically in the development phase and the system’s lifetime. Aerospace companies specifically use digital twins to improve the engineering of new parts by duplicating their achievements in varying conditions, like engine capability in bad weather or the state of the aircraft after more than 300 flight cycles. This aids companies in the improvement of aircraft parts, expanding the durability of the engines, aircraft vehicles, and machinery.
Digital twins are transforming the aerospace industry by opening access to data sets that were previously difficult to obtain. Additionally, cutting-edge technology mitigates the issues regarding the monitoring of a machine’s performance while it is still operating, resulting in underutilised potential and possibilities.
Companies are beginning to use digital twins for different process levels, including detailed design, concept, manufacturing, customer support, and verification.
Digital Twins for Aerospace Data Flow
Digital twins are also used for collecting data and storage. It aids the aviation industry through two types of data flow, horizontal and vertical dataflow. Horizontal data flow comprises data support across numerous junctions of the product, such as product updates and iterations. A vertical data flow consists of data mining and analysis functions for each product junction. Digital twins can generate data, depending on product simulation, diagnosis, and prediction results.
Digital Twins in Smart Manufacturing of Aircraft
In the mid-1990s, companies had already started using CAD/CAE/CAM in their new product development processes. This implies that aerospace NPD had moved from using traditional, hand drawings to digital drawings. In such ways, the applications of digital twins in the aerospace industry have been proven to be very effective. Some of these fields include aircraft engine design, CNC and robot arm-aided machine process, and then assembly. Digital twins can decrease the NPD cycle by 10 to 75 per cent by sidestepping time-consuming tests such as wind tunnel tests, material tests, flight tests, and ground tests to move to the virtual space.
