Potentials of game engines for wind power digital twin development: an investigation of the Unreal Engine

Abstract

Digital twin technologies have become popular in wind energy for monitoring and what-if scenario investigation. However, developing a digital representation of the wind is challenging, especially due to the digital twin platform constraints. Game engines might be possible to solve this issue, especially since game engines have been used for product design, testing, prototyping, and also digital twins. Therefore, this study investigates the potential of developing a digital twin of wind power in the Unreal game engine. A case study of two types of wind turbines (Vestas V164-8 and Enercon E-126 7.580) and one location (Esbjerg, Denmark) is chosen for this study. The digital twin includes the environment with historical wind data and the visual representation of the wind turbine with a wind power production model and the estimated production in the given wind conditions of the area. The results show that game engines are viable for building entire digital twins where a realistic graphical user interface is required. Unreal Engine 5 provides the tools for modelling the landscape, surrounding water, and lighting. In addition, the Unreal Engine ecosystem provides vast amounts of content, such as 3D assets and game logic plugins, easing the digital twin development. The results prove that digital twins built in Unreal Engine 5 have great potential development of digital twins and user interfaces for communicating with a digital twin. The developed digital twin allows for further extension to benefit future digital twins utilizing wind turbines.