Beyond Simulation: Creating & Deploying Digital Twins Starting From Finite Element Analysis
Altair EmployeeTraditional simulation plays a pivotal role in the design of products, offering numerous benefits that streamline the design process, reduce costs, and enhance product quality. This technology, encompassing a range of computational tools and methods, allows designers and engineers to model, analyze, and predict the behavior of products under various conditions without the need for physical prototypes.
On the other hand, digital twin solutions empower organizations to transform their products, systems, and processes. Constructed on the principles of physics, digital twins are advanced digital models of objects, physical systems, or processes, that can ingest data coming from the field (for e.g., from sensors on a machine), they help to make decisions about products in their working environment. With features that combine simulation, high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics, and Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities, teams can design, build, test, optimize, evaluate what-if scenarios, perform predictive maintenance, and extend the remaining useful life (RUL) of their products—without the need of physical prototypes.
Integrating simulation and reduced order modeling with artificial intelligence marks a significant advancement in the fields of product design, development, and lifecycle management. This integration offers a powerful synergy, leveraging the predictive and analytical capabilities of simulation with the real-time, data-driven insights of digital twins. Simulation tools, traditionally used to predict the behavior of designs or processes under various conditions, become even more potent when integrated with digital twins. This combination allows for the simulation of real-world scenarios using live data from the physical counterpart.
In this paper, it shown how simulation data (in this case, data from finite element analyses) can be used to:
a. Run traditional analysis.
b. Create Reduced Order Models (ROMs) using romAI Director of Twin Activate.
c. Create ROMs that can be deployed on Altair IoT platform to use dynamic real-time data.
d. Obtain some real-time visualizations on the Altair IoT platform.
The role of simulation engineers is expected to expand in the future to create digital twins. This paper evaluates how simulation engineers can help build digital twins, that can, in turn, help organizations mitigate risks in the field.
