Development of a Deterministic Model for Studying Digital Twin Applications

Abstract

Within the nuclear space, there is a focus on using technologies to drive down costs of both operating and new build power plants in many sub-domains such as engineering design, maintenance, and construction to name a few. Currently, to analyze and improve on the problems in these sub-domains is not always feasible as they impede on safety of existing assets or there are no assets constructed to perform analyses on. To address these limitations, the use of a Digital Twin system is proposed. Digital twins are computational models that try to replicate the physical assets as closely as possible and augment real life systems with them for continuous data flow and improvement on the virtual representation. There is minimal work published on digital twin models, especially in the nuclear industry. As such, to further explore the feasibility, success, and limitations of such a model, the virtual representation for a representative airlock Digital Twin is developed within the Unity game engine. The physics of the model is based on solving ideal gas law equations and designed in an interactive method to replicate real-time usage of the system. This model will serve as a baseline for future research on the technology.