CAiRS Lecture – Reliability and Safety Analysis using Digital Twins

 The Centre for Advances in Reliability and Safety (CAiRS) organized a webinar named “Reliability and Safety Analysis using Digital Twins” on 9^th March 2022.  The speaker were Mr. Varun Khemani and Dr. Michael H. Azarian.

In the beginning, Dr. Michael H. Azarian introduced what is Digital Twins. He said digital twins approach could help in asset management and maintenance optimization through fault diagnosis and fault prognosis of the various faults of the asset to ensure its safety and reliability.

Mr. Varun Khemani continued to discuss the digital twin for rotating machinery, batteries, and circuits including their failure modes and mechanisms. 

After demonstrated some cases, he mentioned traditional digital twin depended on simulations to approximate the system, but it is not possible to simulate complex system. So he proposed the Deep Digital Twins (DDT) and gave new definitions below.

1.    An implicit physics model of an asset learned from healthy asset data, requiring no explicit physics knowledge.

2.    A digital representation from which sensor values can be sampled under both stationary and non-stationary operational settings such as rotational speed, throttle and load.

3.    A data driven model which does not require any asset specific feature engineering

4.    A probabilistic model which is able to automatically produce a health indicator which is a metric of the deviation from the healthy asset data.

Deep Digital Twins (DDT) framework was proposed afterward.

Finally, he showed some application of DDT such as gearbox and Commercial Modular Aero-Propulsion System Simulation (CMAPSS).  Lastly, Mr. Khemani concluded that digital twins demonstrated for the prediction of remaining useful life, reliability and functional safety for different products. Concept of deep digital twins (DDT) worked with scenarios where digital twin modeling was infeasible.  Reinforcement learning was introduced to digital twin evolving within the system lifetime.

Reference:

CAiRS - https://www.cairs.hk/view/index.php