Desarrollo en Blender del gemelo digital de una estación electro-neumática para su aplicación en laboratorios virtuales

Abstract

This paper presents the development of the digital twin of an electro-pneumatic station composed with 3 pistons, to implement this station in virtual laboratories. The objective of this station is to have an economical alternative for the accomplishment of practices of automation that counts on the capacity to connect through Ethernet with PLCs of the mark of Allen Bradley and with all the PLCs that communicate under the protocol Modbus TCP. Later, in order to develop the digital twin presented in this paper, an electro-pneumatic physical station was taken from the Mechatronics laboratory at the Universidad Tecnológica de Queretaro, the development of this digital twin was done through the free software Blender, complementing it with programming in Python for the Ethernet TCP communication with the different programmable logic controllers. Finally, we carried out the validation of this project through the connection of both the digital twin and the physical station taken as a model, with a ControlLogix PLC. This work will allow the future to implement low-cost virtual laboratories in universities, training centers and interested institutions. The laboratories will have multiple practice scenarios that result in students better prepared in the programming of automated systems in the industry.