August 2023 Volume 5

FORGING RESEARCH

Some of these challenges can be alleviated by introducing a digital twin as an integral part of the forging system. Digital twin is a dynamic model in the virtual world that is fully consistent with its corresponding physical entity and can simulate its physical counterpart’s characteristics and performance in a timely manner [11]: Digital twin is a means to implement cyber-physical fusion and helps in the realization of intelligent manufacturing systems with higher efficiency and fidelity. This project seeks to develop a digital twin for enhancing quality of forgings and production efficiency. The digital twin for forging operation can be divided into two: (a) Digital twin subsystem that addresses the deformation of the billet and the corresponding progression sequences associated with the product. This is discussed in Part I. (b) The digital twin system that replicates the forging machine. This is discussed in Part II of the report. 1.2 Research Objectives The overall objective of this study is to develop a digital twin as an integral part of a forging system, upon which the physical machine and virtual/cyber machine harmoniously communicate and deliberate the influence of “inherent disturbances” on the product forming quality and the underlying loading status of the machine. The digital twin would produce an output map for how to bring about optimal forging conditions. The specific objectives follow: I. Study the current state-of-the-art in warm forging processes across all subsystems constituting a production line. Based on these subsystems, examine the feasibility of digital data collection. Gather data on technical challenges associated with minimizing scrap rate, increasing production efficiency, and engineers and machine operators' handling of variances/ disturbances in forging operations. II. Carry out virtual simulations of a representative warm forging production line. The simulations should include the influence of disturbances on forging quality/deformation behavior as well as die and press structure thermo-mechanical response. III. Carry out simulations for study of Forging Press to study the effect of dynamics of Press frame on the Product quality and process efficiency. IV. From the simulation data, develop a digital twin architecture enabling communication between physical and virtual machines. Chapter 2

customization, mass production and quality output. Digitalization has helped achieve most of it. The resulting large amounts of data are processed, analyzed and evaluated by means of simulation which are finally made available for planning in real-time [13]. Increasing applications and complexity of simulation models has led to the requirement of digital datasets and virtual product development cycles [14]. These digital datasets can be used for achieving the desired outputs in a very short span of time. Thus, Digital twin has proven to be an effective technology for various sectors. The term Digital twin is part of a broader context and intersection of three main research areas, virtual product development, cyber-physical systems and product lifecycle management. A systematic diagram of Digital Twin as per Grieves et al. [15] is shown in Fig. 2-1. The figure shows the six key steps for creating a digital twin. These steps are, create, communicate, aggregate, analyze, insight, and act. The first step is to create, this means to simulate the real world in a digital environment through sensors. The communicate step is when virtual and real world communicate. The aggregate step facilitates data ingestion to the system. It should be noted that this process can take place inside the cloud or anywhere in the world. The fourth step is analysis, this where data is compared, and used to find trends. The fifth step is insight, taking the trends and analytics and presenting them in a way that users or the machine can see the data. The final step is act is where corrective measures can take place.

Literature Review 2.1 Introduction

Figure 2-1: Systematic Layout of Digital Twin Technology Dimitrios et al. [16] discusses the foundation and the building blocks of digital twin as shown in figure 2-2. The primary key components of Digital Twin are Sensors, Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Simulation & Emulations, and Internet of Things (IoT).

This chapter provides a brief literature review on digital twin and a few forging aspects that are important for developing a digital twin. The concept of Digital twin is said to have originated from NASA's Apollo program where two identical spaceships were built for mirroring the conditions of spaceship during the mission [12]. However, the current manufacturing world revolves around

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