Digital Twins for the Basalt Fiber Production 4.0: Smart Digitalization in the Fiber Industry through Industrial IoT (IIoT)

Abstract

Digital trends drive a new generation of the companies in the fiber industry and lead to the emergence of digital ecosystems. Digital twins are the enablers for the creation of such ecosystems. Digital twins create the transparency in the virtual design, tests, implementation optimization of the products, processes or even entire production systems. The modern IoE (Internet of Everything) technology is able to cover a new dimension in terms of monitoring and controlling an operating state of a product, process or system. Digital twin as a virtual representation of the product, production or performance enables the seamless linkage of the individual process steps in the fiber production. This increases efficiency, minimizes the error rate, shortens development cycles and also opens up new business opportunities – that ensuring a sustainable increase the competitiveness in the fiber industry. Unfortunately, it is a very complex topic and has a high impact on internal and external processes. The technical challenges are spread in different domains. Most of fiber production companies currently use only single elements of the digital twins solution in some sub-areas – the overarching solution is missing. Many technical challenges come with the implementation of the architecture of digital twin. The architecture consists of physical devices, an optional device management system, a connectivity solution, a platform, and the actual application. The physical devices capture the data from the real twin (eg. melting furnace, bushings etc). It transports the information to the platform, or it will be stored temporarily in the device management. The device management has the task to control all devices. This is sometimes necessary when the devices are from different suppliers or the device itself is complex. Building Information Modelling (BIM) plays an important role for the planning, design, constructing, operating and maintaining of the new fiber production facilities. Besides a successful implementation of digital twins for the innovative basalt fiber production 4.0 this presentation provides a pragmatic approach to get access to the digital twin technology in the fiber industry. It covers the range from the conceptual understanding of a digital twin to a successful implementation.