IT/OT Engineer at ProjectBinder
With the recent development of automation and Industry 4.0. technologies, machines are gradually becoming more independent, improving production efficiency. However, this also has inherent risks, especially when the interaction between humans and machines is required. Therefore, it is critical to ensure the safety of the machinery used.
What is machine safety?
Machine safety is the ability of a device to perform its intended functionality where risk has been adequately reduced. However, many test scenarios are required for assessing and guaranteeing an acceptable safety level. These machine safety demonstrations are required by law in Europe, according to the Machinery Directive 2006/42/EC (MD 2006/42/EC), and are often complex and expensive for manufacturers and end-users. Thus, it is relevant to investigate ways to make these demonstrations as integrated as possible with the design phase of the machine to reduce costs and time-to-market of machinery.
Digital twin as a prevalidation tool
Digital Twin (DT) technology can facilitate a large number of virtual tests for obtaining relevant information on the performance of machines during different phases of the machine lifecycle, even before the machine has been built. This enables the possibility of testing the machine at an early stage of the design phase, which can be very beneficial for machine safety demonstrations to avoid delays or expensive late design changes.
Focusing on machine safety at such an early stage of the design process instead of just performing the safety tests once the machine has been built will consequently increase the final level of safety of the machinery. At the same time, a DT perfectly fits with the iterative nature of a risk assessment process since it provides the possibility of performing a fast test and redesign iterations until the design is considered valid.
This concludes that Digital Twins could be very beneficial for machine safety demonstrations. However, the final tests on the real machine once it is built remain necessary to follow the standard requirements. Anyhow, if the machine has already been tested using the virtual model, the success rate in these tests will increase significantly.
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Model verification
A relevant challenge when building a Digital Twin is ensuring that it is correctly representing the real system that is based on. This becomes even more relevant when the Digital Twin is used for applications with high importance or accuracy requirements, such as machine safety. Therefore, a part of the project was building a framework for checking if a specific Digital Twin is valid for the purpose it has. This framework was applied to the benchmark system built (system for Qubiqa), obtaining an accuracy higher than 90% in the system´s behaviour.
Machine safety applications in Emulate3D
During this project, the Essential Health and Safety Requirements from the Machinery Directive were analyzed to determine which could benefit from including Digital Twin technology in the machinery design process. This investigation concluded Digital Twins could be beneficial for ergonomics, control, mechanical and protection requirements. Two individual requirements were used as an example of a practical application. Both were analyzed deeply to develop a component in Emulate3D that could demonstrate compliance with them.
Digital twin technology is becoming central to industrial digital transformation, and it is important to understand its full potential, how it works, and which benefits can provide.
Click here to learn all about the Digital twins.
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Poul Kristiansen
Head of Digital Twin