2min Explainer: "What Does a Digital Twin Do in Mining?"

Read time: ~2min

First, what is a Digital Twin?

A digital twin comprises a virtual representation of a selected portion of the physical world, with two way interconnections, synchronized at specified frequencies and fidelities, and designed to create change in the physical that can be measured and improved in the virtual.

“Digital twins codify continuous improvement of assets, systems and processes.”

Digital twins codify continuous improvement of assets, systems and processes. They are purpose built to operate across assets, systems and organisational silos, with historic, near real time and predictive data. They improve decision making by providing people with the right data to make the right decision at the right time, and speeding up how quickly we learn from those decisions.

Asset Digital Twins

Asset digital twins quick extract information on operations and equipment issues to allow rapid production and maintenance decisions, including trade--offs of production vs maintenance, which can lower production losses. Examining alternative work strategies, such as predictive vs planned, for a given system or asset, enables miners to lower maintenance cost and/or increase asset life, lowering lifecycle costs. Constraint twins enable miners to identify non-fault issues, and further trade-off production and buffer management with cost (production & maintenance) models. Sustainability twins bring many asset types together and align energy and emission data with exact operational and work data, enabling accurate and transparent ESG reporting and further potential trade-offs of low impact energy vs production.

Process Digital Twins

Process digital twins extract process related data from existing control systems and low cost non-control sensors, allowing miners to learn and gather insights that enable optimisation outside of the original process design and existing control loops. Examining alternative process strategies, and moving from static to dynamic process analyses, allows miners to test more efficient or effective methods of recovery, lowering production costs or increasing recovery for a given throughput, especially as ore bodies change. Changes to sensors and control strategies can then be incorporated into existing controls and analysis, and the cycle repeats. Process twins are a subset of algorithmic digital twins, which exist across many industries and are underpinned by mathematical optimisation of processes. Algorithmic digital twins are often found in scheduling/planning/supply chain problems.

Engineering Digital Twins

Engineering digital twins bring together disparate data from design, construction and changes to the physical assets (e.g. upgrade projects) to create a coherent engineering or spatial twin of the system. Engineering twins enable lower cost, lower risk upgrades and changes to be made, and complement BIM strategies and capabilities. Asset twins are often the “BIM twin”, owned by the site O&M teams, enabling different use cases, but underpinned by a subset of the engineering / BIM data sets.

A further digital twin subsets is simulation twins, commonly used in health & safety / risk assessment/training visualisations, and process/scenario testing. Any twin type may include simulation or scenario capabilities.

If you would like to understand Digital Twins more and how they could work for you, click below to speak to our team today!