Improving Production Competitiveness

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By Filippo Gilardi

The concept of Digital Twin is one of the big topics in digitalizing manufacturing and enables companies to increase productivity and innovate faster.

Why do I need a digital twin?

A digital twin is a virtual representation of a physical product or system that enables manufacturers to simulate, analyse, and optimise the design and performance of their products both before and after production.

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The use of digital twins in wire and arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) products is becoming increasingly important as it allows manufacturers to address various challenges in the production process, such as ensuring the quality and reliability of the final product. By creating a virtual model of the product, manufacturers can test and predict how it will perform under various conditions, identify potential design flaws, and optimise the production process to reduce waste and increase efficiency.

Digital twins can be used to monitor the performance of the physical product in real-time and detect potential problems before they occur.

Additionally, a digital twin can help in the certification of a product by allowing manufacturers to record and display important production data, ensuring that its productive cycle has met all the necessary standards and regulations.

In contrast to traditional metal-working processes that typically lack the capability for real-time data collection, Directed Energy Deposition (DED) technologies enable continuous monitoring and regulation of the build process, thereby facilitating the acquisition of extensive process parameter and condition information.

This results in improved product quality, reduced costs, and faster time-to-market. Overall, the use of digital twins in WAAM products provides a significant advantage to manufacturers, allowing them to make more informed decisions and produce higher-quality products more efficiently.

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Digitising the production

Digitizing the engineering and manufacturing process by providing Digital Twin solutions is one of MX3D’s priorities, many customers already benefit from it in the end-to-end solution for robotic WAAM.

Using MetalViz customers can process, store, visualize and analyse the whole combination of offline and online data coming from the different steps of the production process, such as toolpath planning, real-time process monitoring as well as user-based labels.

Several renowned certification bodies, including LRQA and Bureau Veritas, have expressed strong support for MetalXL’s Digital Twin technology, recognizing it as a crucial element in achieving successful certification of WAAM products. Some of the most prominent projects, such as the Engie WAPI or the Integradde Trusses only became successful due to the deployment of this technology.