Virtual Prototyping: Evaluating the Digital Twin Based Virtual Factory for New Product Introduction

Shortening lifecycles and increasing complexity make product and production lifecycle processes more challenging than ever for manufacturing enterprises. Virtual Prototyping (VP) technologies promise a viable solution to handle such challenges in reducing time and physical builds as well as increasing quality. In previous studies, the Digital Twin (DT) based Virtual Factory (VF) concept showed significant potential to handle co-evolution by integrating 3D factory and product models with immersive and interactive 3D Virtual Reality (VR) simulation technology as well as real-time bidirectional data synchronisation between virtual and physical production systems. In this article, we present an extension to the paper “Demonstrating and Evaluating the Digital Twin Based Virtual Factory for Virtual Prototyping” presented at CARV2021. The study presents an evaluation by industry experts of the DT based VF concept for VP in the context of New Product Introduction (NPI) processes. The concept is demonstrated in two cases: wind turbine blade manufacturing and nacelle assembly operations at Vestas Wind Systems A/S. The study shows that the VF provides an immersive virtual environment, which allows the users to reduce the time needed for prototyping. The industry experts propose several business cases for the introduced solution and find that the phases that would have the most gain are the later ones (production) where the product design is more mature.

Advanced virtual prototyping for cyber-physical systems using RISC-V: implementation, verification and challenges

Virtual prototypes (VPs) are crucial in today’s design flow. VPs are predominantly created in SystemC transaction-level modeling (TLM) and are leveraged for early software development and other system-level use cases. Recently, virtual prototyping has been introduced for the emerging RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) and become an important piece of the growing RISC-V ecosystem. In this paper, we present enhanced virtual prototyping solutions tailored for RISC-V. The foundation is an advanced open source RISC-V VP implemented in SystemC TLM and designed as a configurable and extensible platform. It scales from small bare-metal systems to large multi-core systems that run applications on top of the Linux operating system. Based on the RISC-V VP, this paper also discusses advanced VP-based verification approaches and open challenges. In combination, we provide for the first time an integrated and unified overview and perspective on advanced virtual prototyping for RISC-V.

DEVELOPMENT OF A µBRDF GONIOSPECTROPHOTOMETER FOR BRDF MEASUREMENT ON TINY SURFACES

A µBRDF goniospectrophotometer has been developed at LNE-CNAM. This device performs traceable BRDF measurement with a measurement surface of 30 µm of diameter. All angular configuration of measurement belonging to the hemisphere are possible. The spectral range is the visible. This device intends to help to progress in the effort to extent the BRDF metrological scale from the centimetre size to micrometre size. Traceable µBRDF measurement are requested today to validate physical based rendering models used in virtual prototyping and to progress in the comprehension of the appearance of natural material like wool, wood, or leather.

Systematic review of centrifugal valving based on digital twin modeling towards highly integrated lab-on-a-disc systems

Current, application-driven trends towards larger-scale integration (LSI) of microfluidic systems for comprehensive assay automation and multiplexing pose significant technological and economical challenges to developers. By virtue of their intrinsic capability for powerful sample preparation, centrifugal systems have attracted significant interest in academia and business since the early 1990s. This review models common, rotationally controlled valving schemes at the heart of such “Lab-on-a-Disc” (LoaD) platforms to predict critical spin rates and reliability of flow control which mainly depend on geometries, location and liquid volumes to be processed, and their experimental tolerances. In absence of larger-scale manufacturing facilities during product development, the method presented here facilitates efficient simulation tools for virtual prototyping and characterization and algorithmic design optimization according to key performance metrics. This virtual in silico approach thus significantly accelerates, de-risks and lowers costs along the critical advancement from idea, layout, fluidic testing, bioanalytical validation, and scale-up to commercial mass manufacture.

A Virtual Prototyping Model on Dynamic Behaviors of Prefabricated Bridges

With loads on prefabricated bridges becoming more and more heavier, their dynamic behaviors should be paid more attention to. A virtual prototyping model with the object-oriented technology and the mode synthesis method is presented in MATLAB to analyze dynamic behaviors of prefabricated bridges. Using structural characteristics of the bridges properly, substructures can be looked on as objects which can be encapsulated with the mode synthesis method. The compatibility conditions on interfaces, the Lagrange’s equation and Ritz’s variational principle play the role of messages transmitting among objects. Simulation results indicate that the present model can easily study dynamic behaviors of bridges in the same model.