An article reviews the development history of digital twins abroad
In 2002, Dr. Michael Grieves, a professor at the University of Michigan, first proposed the concept of digital twins in an article. He pointed out that with the help of data from physical devices, a virtual entity and subsystem that can represent the physical device can be constructed in the virtual (information) space. Moreover, this connection is not one-way and static, but closely connected throughout the entire life cycle of the product. Obviously, this concept is not limited to the product design stage, but extends to the production and service stages. However, due to the limited digital means at the time, the concept of digital twins only remained in the product design stage, presenting the prototype of the physical device through digital models.
Since then, the concept of digital twins has gradually expanded to fields such as simulation, virtual assembly and 3D printing. After 2014, with the continuous development of Internet of Things technology, artificial intelligence and virtual reality technology, more industrial products and equipment have intelligent characteristics, and digital twins have also expanded to the complete product cycle stage including manufacturing and services, and their forms and concepts have been continuously enriched.
Abroad, the development of digital twin technology is earlier than in China, and its application fields are also more extensive. At present, foreign digital twin technology is mainly used in aerospace, medical health and urban planning.
The concept of digital twin was first proposed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 2002 and was initially used in fields such as earth observation and meteorological simulation. In the following decade, digital twin technology has undergone many developments, applications and innovations. Specifically, its development process mainly includes the following stages:
In the field of aerospace, digital twin technology is widely used in aircraft design, flight simulation and maintenance. Through this technology, aerospace companies can design and simulate aircraft in a virtual environment to discover and solve potential problems in advance. At the same time, digital twin technology can also be used for aircraft maintenance. By building a digital twin model of the aircraft, real-time monitoring and prediction of aircraft status and maintenance needs can be achieved.
In the field of medical health, digital twin technology is used in disease diagnosis, surgical planning and personalized treatment. With this technology, medical institutions can establish a digital twin model of the patient to analyze and predict the condition and treatment effect. In addition, digital twin technology can also be used for surgical planning, and the surgical effect and safety can be improved by virtual simulation of the surgical process.
In the field of urban planning, digital twin technology is used in urban design, transportation planning and environmental management. Through digital twin technology, urban planning departments can build digital twin models of cities to simulate and evaluate urban development and planning schemes. At the same time, this technology can also be applied to traffic planning and environmental management, and improve urban traffic efficiency and environmental quality by simulating and optimizing traffic flow and environmental pollution.
In the field of oil industry, B.OKhuijsen and others from Siemens believe that digital twin technology is the core of the next generation of real-time production monitoring and system optimization of oil and gas. The digital twin of smart oil and gas fields will start from the early design stage of the project and advance in parallel with the construction of physical assets.
Aker Solution has established a software and digital service company ix3. Its integral digital twin platform integrates cloud computing, industrial Internet of Things, machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies to optimize the integrity, safety and performance of energy assets throughout their life cycle. FutureOn's FieldTwin solution is a digital twin for offshore oil field planning, deployment and/or operation. Topsides4.0 developed by Siemens can be used for the construction of intelligent digital twins for offshore oil and gas production, testing the infrastructure, safety logic and operation processes of processes and controls before the facility is started. GE and drilling contractors jointly launched the first digital drilling ship, which performs predictive analysis and maintenance on the performance and reliability of related equipment.
eDrilling claims that it established the world's first drilling digital twin system as early as 2008. The system consists of an advanced modular simulation engine and a 3D virtual wellbore, and its functions cover the entire life cycle of well construction, including drilling optimization design, pre-drilling simulation preview, actual drilling monitoring and parameter optimization, post-drilling playback and simulation training. At present, the company is developing artificial intelligence models to improve the intelligence level of the system. This is the software product that is closest to the concept of digital twins and has achieved engineering applications.
Sekal has developed a system similar to eDrilling, which is mainly used for real-time monitoring and trend analysis while drilling. It can monitor drilling behaviors related to wellbore instability in real time (such as drill string tripping speed, rotation speed, pump start speed, displacement, etc.), automatically make optimization and adjustment decisions, and connect with key equipment such as on-site drilling rigs (such as top drives, drawworks and drilling pumps) to achieve automatic control of drilling.
Halliburton also proposed the concept of oil and gas digital twins and applied it to the DecisionSpace365 cloud platform. The platform's Well Construction Engineering 4.0 realizes the integration and digitization of the entire process of well location design, drilling engineering design and well construction management, thereby achieving continuous and efficient optimization of the oil and gas well construction process. The well construction digital twin is a system that uses design and simulation methods to replicate virtual wells, drilling rigs, downhole components and model operation scenarios. It is a combination of mathematical models, software algorithms and data models, including downhole and ground drilling rigs. Downhole mainly includes wellbore trajectory, drill string, drilling fluid and pressure control, reservoir and wellbore integrity, and ground drilling rigs include lifting systems, drilling pumps, top drives, rotary tables, kelly rods and winches.
In general, although digital twin technology originated in the manufacturing industry, it is also applicable to the oil industry. At present, the application of digital twin technology in the oil industry is still in its infancy, mainly used in the planning and predictive maintenance of asset facilities, covering drilling ships, drilling platforms and production equipment. Although some companies claim that their systems are digital twins (such as the eDrilling system), in fact they only achieve three-dimensional visualization of some physical assets, calculation, analysis and display of some real-time information, and still have deficiencies in data intelligent drive and decision-making instructions to reverse control physical entities. Therefore, their systems are only closer to the concept of digital twins and are far from achieving the true goal of digital twin technology.