Scalable Digital Twin to Bridge Plant Design.

Emerson today announced the first offering to come from the 2018 alliance between Emerson and AspenTech - a new integration technology that will make it more practical and efficient for organisations to create digital twins for use across an entire plant’s lifecycle. With the new capabilities and expertise achieved through this joint development, process industry organisations can now use data from the standard digital twin created during plant design engineering to easily create a real-time digital twin for training operators and optimising production. This development lowers two of the most significant barriers to digital twin utilisation: total cost of ownership and maintainability.

Emerson is natively integrating its Mimic™ simulation software with Aspen HYSYS® Simulation Software, widely used in project engineering. Combining with Mimic adds real-time process optimisation and training and makes building and maintaining an operations digital twin much easier for thousands of organisations already using AspenTech’s HYSYS software.

“Organisations can now maximise the digital value of their investment by creating a digital twin once during plant design and using it across the lifecycle of their operations,” said Jim Nyquist, group president for Emerson’s Systems & Solutions business. “This makes digital transformation via digital twin more real and practical for the process industries.”

Digital twin technologies are a component of Emerson’s Plantweb™ digital ecosystem, a scalable portfolio of solutions that enable digital transformation, and are increasingly sought-after solutions for organisations looking to utilise energy and materials resources more efficiently to lower costs and increase output.

The Mimic HYSYS Link software includes automated configuration tools that enable bulk data transfer between Emerson and AspenTech systems, reducing integration time and engineering hours. Built-in readiness for virtualisation and cloud technologies in Mimic software make it easier for users to maintain up-to-date engineering and training environments and avoid the large capital expense of creating duplicate physical hardware systems. Organisations can continuously update their digital twins for greater decision integrity and thereby use real-time dynamic models to test performance improvements safely in a cloud-based simulation before deploying at their actual plant.

One of the prime barriers to digital transformation - including adopting a digital twin - is how to scale the technologies for an operating unit, a site, and enterprises. Mimic’s selective fidelity process modelling allows organisations to choose the design detail of their digital twin’s simulation scaled to the organisation’s budget and potential return on investment. Operations that have a foundation of HYSYS models can economically expand their model base to include more of the operation.

The simulation software works natively with Emerson’s DeltaV™ distributed control system or connects into third-party control systems, giving organisations added efficiencies when using DeltaV or the ability to model different areas of their operations that may use different control systems using only one simulation interface.

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