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What is a Digital Twin and Why do I care about it? 

Digital Twins are the product of “digitalization” (the process of converting a physical object into a digital object.  The application of digital twins is emmense for manufacturing.  This is true for all stage of products and production including: R&D, Scale Up, and Mature Production Processes.  The digital twin answers the call to test things quickly and eliminates many of the physical and montary constraints of the world.  Notably, it is not eliminating them from existing,  instead it is displacing them.  This is best seen by example. If a facility is facing problems with an extraction or diffusion process resulting in poor yield.  The implementation of a digital twin should be conducted in phases.  The full digital twin is what most facilities want to develop for all of their equipment, but the reality of the complexity to maintain such a model and communications is immense.  Therefore the agile approach allows VESL to implement individual digital twins incrementally. This allows operations to utilize the digital twin more immediately to identify alternative operating windows, identify root causes for process defects, reduce risk of product defects, train operations faster and iterate through alternative operating conditions and equipment faster.  Not everything needs to be tested and scaled to pilot equipment.   Instead the testing can be performed virtually and select cases will be validated on the physical equipment.  This reduces experimental time and shortens the development process for achieving operating targets.  Those targets may be a reduction in downtime, improved performance, quality, or evaluation of new equipment or modifications to existing equipment without having to undergo the physical construction first.  

Once a digital twin is developed, these can be directly integrated with the process data to refine the performance of the digital twin.  Additionally with realtime communication they can be used to identify the expected change in operating performance then provide feedback directly to the controls system or operations to modify the process.  This allows the process to correct issues or escalate risks to key individuals.  This can be utilized to prevent or mitigate potential downtimes, production losses, or other defects.   The digital twin provides a set of headlights to the operation of the equipment so that the facility may make adjustments and avoid driving off the road. This is why all manufacturers should be evaluating how to begin implementing digital twins, and where they can be applied.  

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