The world is going digital. This is leading the way in changing every aspect of our life, from digital documentations and communications, to online banking and shopping, then digitized libraries and museums. The same is happening to the industry, first by digital methods for designing with CAD, and now by Digital Twins for manufacturing processes with simulation and related computer technologies.
Digital Twin is a virtual representation of a physical object, system or process by using simulation and other computerized digital technologies. It can be used to analyze and simulate a system or process in real world conditions to adapt to changes, increase flexibility, optimize operations, improve quality, save time, reduce costs and add value.
The concept has been around since early 2000s. It has then got greater attention and stronger momentum to thrive in the last few years, especially since it was named one of Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for consecutively three years 2017, 2018, 2019.
There have been many publications, presentations and demonstrations on the creation of digital twins by using numerical simulation with finite element modeling, but most have focused on product or system designing. It is far more challenging, with still much work to be done, to create digital twins for the dynamic manufacturing processes, such as welding and joining processes. However, this is essential for the complete digitalization of the welding industry.
For the manufacturing industry, the Digital Twin isn’t, and shouldn’t be, just for Designing.
In case of welding, the it shall be created for the complete welding lifecycle from Designing, Optimizing, Planning, to Producing and Evaluating the welds. This requires simulations with virtual models to be highly accurate and consistent with capabilities to make reliable predictions and optimizations.
SORPAS® is now ready to take the challenge of creating the first Welding Digital Twins for the complete lifecycle of resistance spot welding processes.
Five functionalities of the digital twins for resistance welding will be available:
Further details about how the digital twins are created with SORPAS simulations and the interactions with artificial intelligence (AI) are presented in the special page of welding solutions on Digital Twins and AI.