DE 24/7 Virtual Summit Digital Thread Roundup

During the recent DE 24/7 Virtual Design & Simulation Summit, Madhav Gupta, Digital Twin Engineer at Weber Food Technology, revealed how he and his team developed and deployed digital twins to design and configure entire food-processing lines that could meet their customers’ requirements. The Germany-based company manufactures all-in-one equipment for the food industry. If you shop for bacon, cured meat, or deli sandwiches at Walmart, chances are, “you may have eaten something cut by our machines,” said Gupta.

In food industry terms, the line is an assembly, encompassing machines for packaging, labeling, slicing, and portion control, among others. “We started our digital twin program with a single slicer. Now it has expanded to preparation machines, portion managers, and pickers,” said Gupta.

The company’s design and simulation tools include Altair’s Inspire, SimLab, and SimSolid, along with Schneider Electric's ECAD and Dassault Systemes SOLIDWORKS. Explaining the motivation behind the digital twins, Gupta said, “We use simulation for topology optimization, fluid flow, and others, but what we needed was a physics-based line configuration, with virtual commissioning and decommissioning and a virtual HMI (human-machine interface display). This way, we can see the capacity of the entire line. We can answer questions like: 'Can it produce 85 sandwiches a minute? What is the impact if one of the slicers go down?'”

Weber’s digital twin comes with a digital version of the real machine’s HMI, connected to the real machine’s programmable logic control software. One of the side benefits of having digital twins was the ability to train technicians without subjecting the real machines to stress. Engineers also found it easier to configure the line to fit the customer’s needs. “A line can have more than 1000 parameters. We need to find the right setting to do what the customer wants. If we’re testing and tweaking the parameters all day on the real machines, we waste a lot of time and raw materials,” said Gupta.

Looking ahead, Gupta said he is planning to combine the digital twins with physics-informed reinforcement learning. You can watch the recorded webinar here.