Developing a digital twin of centrifugal pump for performance evaluation

Abstract

Performance Evaluation of a physical asset can be made effortless with a headway to its virtual replica “A Digital Twin”. This article focuses on a thorough review of a digital twin of a centrifugal pump for performance evaluation. An exception to conventional performance evaluation method of a centrifugal pump can be made by its digital twin. This also proves beneficial for higher capacity pumps with appropriate scaling of the twin as the variant changes. A digital twin system may be useful to eliminate the setup and installation time, and the capital cost to develop product specific test bench. A twin which can be simulated and evaluated using MATLAB can be developed. The process that was used for creating a digital twin of centrifugal pump involves steps like selection of parameters to be measured, selection of microcontroller for data acquisition, IOT cloud interfacing using ThingSpeak, simulation of MATLAB model of centrifugal pump in ideal environment for flow rate measurement using Simscape. For obtaining the real-time data for flow rate of the centrifugal pump, a water flow sensor was attached to the pump and the sensor data was obtained and uploaded to ThingSpeak using ESP32 WiFi module. The ideal data for the flow rate of the centrifugal pump was obtained by creating a SimScape model of the centrifugal pump and flow sensor arrangement and simulating it in ideal environment. This will include, receiving sensor data to and during the operation of the pump and monitored on ThingSpeak IOT platform. The result of this entire process will be a statistical twin of a centrifugal pump for its performance evaluation based on the performance parameter- flow rate.