How digital twins can reduce equipment commissioning time

Over the past decade, industrial digital transformation has enabled organizations to leverage the growth of data and connectivity to improve operations and engineering. Connecting Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices and embedding tools, such as digital twins, across the IT/OT infrastructure allows deep data to be gathered, analyzed and contextualized to add meaning and value, providing complete and early visibility across an enterprise.

Having this visibility empowers engineers to make informed decisions that can help lower operational risks, respond faster to changes, and operate more e ciently. It can also reduce the time and e ort needed to deploy engineering solutions by creating new means to execute activities virtually.

As designers and customers are aware, time is costly when dealing with the construction and commissioning of equipment. Often, much of the investment comes directly from facility commissioning. Technologies leveraging digital twins can save organizations up to 40% in time compared to conventional methods through the application of a practice called virtual commissioning. While virtual commissioning is not a new capability, we are seeing a wider adoption of it in recent years.

A word on Digital Twins

Before diving deeper into virtual commissioning, it’s important to first understand digital twins and their industry adoption. A digital twin is a superior, virtual representation of a physical entity or system across its lifecycle using comprehensive data, analytics, simulation, and emulations. They can help virtualize physical designs, products, and processes, resulting in faster prototypes, more agile processes through simulations, and the ability to spot design issues early in the cycle, minimizing rework and accelerating cycle time. This means systems or processes can be tested and validated, and potential failures identified, before they even exist in the real world. Digital twin has many di erent applications in industrial manufacturing, including virtual commissioning.

The global digital twin market value is set to surpass $53.5 billion by 2028, exhibiting a CAGR of 42.1% during the forecast period 2022-2028. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that many organizations, from mining and manufacturing to healthcare, are adopting digital twin strategies as part of their digital transformation roadmaps. The application of digital twin spans the value chain and can be used for design, system simulation, integration, monitoring, training, and maintenance across industries.

While virtual modeling has commonly been used for product design in industries like aerospace and auto, the wider adoption of modeling in operations used for the testing of engineering equipment is relatively new.

Applied to industrial enterprises, digital twins enable engineering teams to virtually perform activities that have conventionally been done through empirical calculations or physical work. This includes design validation, throughput analysis, and equipment testing. Doing this work manually can be labor intensive and often inaccurate.

Why Virtual Commissioning?

There are considerable investments being made in digital twin technology to improve operations throughout the lifecycle of a facility. This is where virtual commissioning comes in. It can bridge traditional and virtual development by leveraging the technology to model and emulate real equipment and engineering systems.

As industrial organizations consider expanding facilities or constructing new ones, it’s critical that every step in the design and deployment of these projects is executed smoothly, e ciently, and cost-e ectively to ensure operations begin and ROI is achieved

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