digital twins

The coronavirus crisis had a devastating effect on oil-company revenues, but it has posed a tough human-resources problem too: how to keep workers safe on cramped rigs at sea where social-distancing is impossible. Many operators have found an answer in technology—specifically, digital twins.

Shell has selected Bentley Systems, a provider of software and digital twin cloud services, to help streamline its capital projects and decrease time to first oil.

DNV GL and floating production, storage, and offloading (FPSO) vessel specialist Bluewater are undertaking a pilot project to use hybrid digital twin technology to predict and analyze fatigue in the hull of an FPSO in the North Sea.

Using 3D and artificial intelligence technologies, a digital map of all three bridge-linked jackets was captured, enabling Neptune to detect asset-integrity issues early and plan fabric maintenance work on Cygnus.

Often it is too difficult to create the fault conditions necessary for training a predictive maintenance algorithm on the actual machine. A digital twin generates simulated failure data, which can then be used to design a fault-detection algorithm.

Time-stamped data anomalies can lead to more-accurate identification and faster diagnosis.

In partnership with TechnipFMC, DNV GL opened a pilot project for the international collaboration of operators and the supply chain. Many digital twins represent an asset’s initial form and struggle to reflect developments in their physical counterparts as the asset matures.

Digital twins are powerful combinations of models and data that “age” throughout the lifecycle of an asset as they gather and integrate data from the field. This technology is a quantum leap from earlier efforts at modeling complex systems.

A proving ground for the use of digital twins has emerged in the North Sea. There, operators Total, Aker BP, and Shell have each developed and deployed twins that they expect to pay big dividends.

ADNOC will utilize Honeywell’s asset monitoring and predictive analytics platform to improve asset efficiency and integrity across the operator’s upstream and downstream businesses.