- For the example of digital twins
in the operations and maintenance phase,
I will discuss the work being done
at a large global oil company.
At their oil refineries,
highly complex facilities that transform crude oil
into products such as gasoline and diesel,
there are thousands of pieces of equipment.
As you can imagine, maintenance is a big deal.
It's a major overhead that creates disruption
and significant cost.
Being able to better predict maintenance issues
is an important new focus.
Digitalization, and in particular digital twins,
are beginning to play a role in improved operations.
This project is underway and will continue through 2024.
The duration reflects the complexity
and the scale of the effort.
By the time it is finished,
the company anticipates that equipment will be able
to let engineers know exactly how it is performing
rather than relying on older, less reliable techniques.
This insight and capability will represent a sea change.
Equipment at the refineries
will have a variety of wireless sensors attached
at specific points.
Low-cost wireless sensors
means that scale is no longer a limitation.
There is no need for complicated,
difficult to deploy and time intensive wiring.
These wireless sensors will collectively create
an Industrial Internet of Things, or IIOT, network.
Data collected from this IIOT network
will be sent to a central cloud service.
From there, multiple services will be able to request
the data for different objectives.
The project is being deployed incrementally
so that benefits can be realized in phases
rather than just at the end.
One of the recent milestones was the addition of sensors
on some heat exchangers.
These are large machines that can be the size
of a small building and are used for cooling.
An unplanned outage can take days to resolve.
For this project and phase,
four wireless sensors were placed in strategic areas
to capture a variety of data sets,
including temperature and oil flow.
Collecting data and processing it
through a supervisory digital twin
now enables engineers to predict
when the heat exchanger will become dirty and need cleaning.
This reduces down time and unnecessary repairs.
With 5,000 heat exchangers,
the savings are likely to be in the millions of dollars.
By 2024, most of the company's equipment
will have wireless sensors
and an attendant digital twins architecture.
It is anticipated that disruption
and lost profit opportunities will be reduced.
Value creation will be a result
of combined asset performance management.