Enhancing the sustainability of producing entails optimizing whole product lifecycles — from materials sourcing and transportation to design, manufacturing, distribution and end-of-life disposal.
In response to the Worldwide Power Company, lowering the carbon footprint of commercial manufacturing by simply 1% may save 90 million tons of CO₂ emissions yearly. That’s equal to taking greater than 20 million gasoline-powered vehicles off the street annually.
Applied sciences akin to digital twins and accelerated computing are enabling producers to scale back emissions, improve vitality effectivity and meet the rising demand for environmentally acutely aware manufacturing.
Siemens and NVIDIA are on the forefront of creating applied sciences that assist clients obtain their sustainability objectives and enhance manufacturing processes.
Key Challenges in Sustainable Manufacturing
Balancing sustainability with enterprise goals like profitability stays a high concern for producers. A research by Ernst & Younger in 2022 discovered that digital twins can cut back building prices by as much as 35%, underscoring the shut hyperlink between useful resource consumption and building bills.
But, one of many greatest challenges in driving sustainable manufacturing and lowering overhead is the presence of silos between departments, totally different vegetation inside the similar group and throughout manufacturing groups. These silos come up from quite a lot of points, together with conflicting priorities and incentives, an absence of widespread energy-efficiency metrics and language, and the necessity for brand spanking new abilities and options to bridge these gaps.
Information administration additionally presents a hurdle, with many producers struggling to show huge quantities of information into actionable insights — significantly these that may affect sustainability objectives.
In response to a case research by The Producer, 1 / 4 of respondents surveyed acknowledged that their knowledge shortcomings negatively affect vitality effectivity and environmental sustainability, with almost a 3rd reporting that knowledge is siloed to native use circumstances.
Addressing these challenges requires modern approaches that break down boundaries and use knowledge to drive sustainability. Appearing as a central hub for info, digital twin know-how is proving to be a necessary instrument on this effort.
The Position of Digital Twins in Sustainable Manufacturing
Industrial-scale digital twins constructed on the NVIDIA Omniverse growth platform and Common Scene Description (OpenUSD) are reworking how producers strategy sustainability and scalability.
These applied sciences energy digital twins that take engineering knowledge from numerous sources and contextualize it as it might seem in the true world. This breaks down info silos and presents a holistic view that may be shared throughout groups — from engineering to gross sales and advertising and marketing.
This enhanced visibility permits engineers and designers to simulate and optimize product designs, facility layouts, vitality use and manufacturing processes earlier than bodily manufacturing begins. That enables for deeper insights and collaboration by serving to stakeholders make extra knowledgeable choices to enhance effectivity and cut back expensive errors and last-minute modifications that may end up in important waste.
To additional rework how merchandise and experiences are designed and manufactured, Siemens is integrating NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud utility programming interfaces into its Siemens Xcelerator platform, beginning with Teamcenter X, its cloud-based product lifecycle administration software program.
These integrations allow Siemens to convey the facility of photorealistic visualization to complicated engineering knowledge and workflows, permitting corporations to create physics-based digital twins that assist get rid of workflow waste and errors.
Siemens and NVIDIA have demonstrated how corporations like HD Hyundai, a frontrunner in sustainable ship manufacturing, are utilizing these new capabilities to visualise and work together with complicated engineering knowledge at new ranges of scale and constancy.
HD Hyundai is unifying and visualizing complicated engineering initiatives straight inside Teamcenter X.
Physics-based digital twins are additionally being utilized to check and validate robotics and bodily AI earlier than they’re deployed into real-world manufacturing amenities.
Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics producer, has launched a digital plant that pushes the boundaries of commercial automation. Foxconn’s digital twin platform, constructed on Omniverse and NVIDIA Isaac, replicates a brand new manufacturing facility within the Guadalajara, Mexico, electronics hub to permit engineers to optimize processes and practice robots for environment friendly manufacturing of NVIDIA Blackwell techniques.
By simulating the manufacturing facility setting, engineers can decide the very best placement for heavy robotic arms, optimize motion and maximize protected operations whereas strategically positioning hundreds of sensors and video cameras to watch all the manufacturing course of.
Using digital twins, like these in Foxconn’s digital manufacturing facility, is changing into more and more widespread in industrial settings for simulation and testing.
Foxconn’s chairman, Younger Liu, highlighted how the digital twin will result in enhanced automation and effectivity, leading to important financial savings in time, price and vitality. The corporate expects to extend manufacturing effectivity whereas lowering vitality consumption by over 30% yearly.
By connecting knowledge from Siemens Xcelerator software program to its platform constructed on NVIDIA Omniverse and OpenUSD, the digital plant permits Foxconn to design and practice robots in a sensible, simulated setting, revolutionizing its strategy to automation and sustainable manufacturing.
Making Each Watt Depend
One consideration for industries all over the place is how the rising demand for AI is outpacing the adoption of renewable vitality. This implies enterprise leaders, significantly manufacturing plant and knowledge heart operators, should maximize vitality effectivity and guarantee each watt is utilized successfully to steadiness decarbonization efforts alongside AI progress.
The perfect and easiest technique of optimizing vitality use is to speed up each doable workload.
Utilizing accelerated computing platforms that combine each GPUs and CPUs, producers can considerably improve computational effectivity.
GPUs, particularly designed for dealing with complicated calculations, can outperform conventional CPU-only techniques in AI duties. These techniques could be as much as 20x extra vitality environment friendly in the case of AI inference and coaching.
This leap in effectivity has fueled substantial positive factors over the previous decade, enabling AI to deal with extra complicated challenges whereas sustaining energy-efficient operations.
Constructing on these advances, companies can additional cut back their environmental affect by adopting key vitality administration methods. These embody implementing vitality demand administration and effectivity measures, scaling battery storage for short-duration energy outages, securing renewable vitality sources for baseload electrical energy, utilizing renewable fuels for backup technology and exploring modern concepts like warmth reuse.
Be part of the Siemens and NVIDIA session on the 7X24 Change 2024 Fall Convention to find how digital twins and AI are driving sustainable options throughout knowledge facilities.
The Way forward for Sustainable Manufacturing: Industrial Digitalization
The subsequent frontier in manufacturing is the convergence of the digital and bodily worlds in what is called industrial digitalization, or the “industrial metaverse.” Right here, digital twins turn out to be much more immersive and interactive, permitting producers to make data-driven choices quicker than ever.
“We’ll revolutionize how merchandise and experiences are designed, manufactured and serviced,” stated Roland Busch, president and CEO of Siemens AG. “On the trail to the commercial metaverse, this subsequent technology of commercial software program permits clients to expertise merchandise as they might in the true world: in context, in gorgeous realism and — sooner or later — work together with them by means of pure language enter.”
Main the Method With Digital Twins and Sustainable Computing
Siemens and NVIDIA’s collaboration showcases the facility of digital twins and accelerated computing for lowering the environmental affect brought on by the manufacturing trade yearly. By leveraging superior simulations, AI insights and real-time knowledge, producers can cut back waste and enhance vitality effectivity on their path to decarbonization.
Study extra about how Siemens and NVIDIA are accelerating sustainable manufacturing.
Examine NVIDIA’s sustainable computing efforts and take a look at the energy-efficiency calculator to find potential vitality and emissions financial savings.