Developing Digital Twins for the water industry

Project Status

Ongoing

Motivation

Digitalisation in general and digital twins in particular are of growing interest in the water and wastewater treatment industries. However, digitalisation technologies have some inherent risks, and digital twinning is a complex field and the barriers to entry can be significant. Having a digital twin at an existing industrial water treatment pilot would enable stakeholders to ‘try before they buy’.

Approach

Implement remote access to and a digital twin of a local Australian water treatment pilot plant to give stakeholders an opportunity to see and experience digital twinning applied to a water process. The industrial pilot plant digital twin would be available for industrial training, and also provide remote monitoring and operational access to the plant. Stakeholders involved in this project would be co-supervising and interacting with the students working on the digital twin development, giving companies a pipeline to workforce development via direct access to the next generation of engineers. The project will be executed by Monash students under the co-supervision of Monash academics and industry stakeholder advisors. The students would be recruited via Monash, and industry partners would have the opportunity to be part of the interview and selection process.

Outcomes

This project is ongoing. The current phase is preliminary design and preparation of a proposal for industry funding for the detailed project. In time, we hope to realise the following outcomes:

• Remote access to and operation of the existing pilot plant
• Dynamic model of the pilot plant for offline process simulation
• Digital twinning of the pilot plant for real-time process simulation