London Digital Twin Research Centre

By Huan Nguyen, William Davis, and Ciaran Sinclair

Formula 1 (F1) is a billion-pound sport that blends between entertainment (a show) and competition. It is arguably the most advanced, high-tech sport in the world. Each F1 team’s factory consists of 1000+ employees who works day and night to just produce two cars that only two drivers can drive them. It costs millions of pounds to produce a racing F1 car and the costs of development and operations throughout the year add up to further hundreds of millions. As many as 3000+ car parts are produced each week by each team. Teams invest heavily to just happily outpace other teams’ cars by a tenth of a second a lap when racing in a circuit of over 5km.

The two key things for a winning team: i) produce a very good racing car; and ii) be slick and efficient in operation as a team. Both of these can be decisively supported by one key technology: Digital Twin, because of its largely data-driven environment and the decision making is often made in real-time manner (in pressurised racing conditions).

Continue reading “Formula 1 is Leading the Digital Twin Technology”

London Digital Twin Research Centre’s Director, Prof. Huan Nguyen, is chairing the Digital Twins for the Future panel at the IEEE International Smart Cities Conference 2021, where an in-depth discussion about the opportunities, challenges, and expected impact of the Digital Twins on various industries will be carried out.

The panel will include experts in the field who will engage in exciting debates about how Smart Cities of the future can benefit from the up-and-coming Digital Twins breakthroughs. Leading the discussion, there will be Prof. Huan Nguyen (Director of LDTRC, Middlesex University, UK), Dr. Erkan Oterkus (Director of PeriDynamics Research Centre, University of Strathclyde), Dr. Souvik Barat (Head of Enterprise Digital Twin Research Initiative, TCS Research), and Dr. Thanh Bui-Tien (Deputy Dean of the Civil Engineering Faculty and Head of the Bridge Engineering and Underground Infrastructure Department, University of Transport and Communications, Vietnam).

More information about the panel, as well as the registration link, can be found at: https://attend.ieee.org/isc2-2021/digital-twins-for-the-future/

By Prof Guido De Roeck (KU Leuven), external advisor and project partner at LDTRC

With more than 500 scientific journal and conference papers, Prof. De Roeck is a world-famous expert in vibration based damage detection, dynamic system identification and soil structure interaction and vehicle bridge interaction. In this short talk, Prof. De Roeck addresses relevant topics in our Newton Fund project on digital twin for structural health monitoring (SHM) between Middlesex Uni (UK) and Uni. of Transport and Communications (Vietnam), in which KU Leven is an associated partner.

He outlines recent development in sensoring techniques in SHM, non-model and model-based methods for vibration-based damage detection. For example, the non-model based methods can be the alarm/alerting just based on the pure or preprocessed measurement data, or the stochastic treatment to distinguish temperature influence from real structural damage. The model based approach can be the digital twin structure that is adapted according to measurement results. The adaptation, updating, calibration can use global optimization methods like Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) , Genetic Algorithm (GA). Prof. De Roeck also discusses the digital transformation (with references to relevant projects in Europe) for predictive maintenance of important infrastructures in case of extreme events, such us, earthquakes, collapse of Morandi Bridge in Genova, Italy in 2018.

The London Digital Twin Research Centre would like to extend an invitation to all the Digital Twin researchers and enthusiasts from industry and academia to attend our annual 2021 workshop which is held online on June 4th, 2021. This virtual “Workshop on Transforming Industry and Society with Digital Twins” brings together experts from industry and academia to share their valuable insights regarding the adoption of the Digital Twin technology across different industries, from structural health monitoring, pandemic management, smart campuses through to health and wellbeing. The domains covered in this event provide opportunities and research challenges that the future maturation of digital twin technology demands. The virtual workshop represents an excellent opportunity for networking for Digital Twin enthusiasts to share ideas for future developments in digital twins.

Programme: DT workshop_June2021

Eventbrite registration (free): Link

Time/date: 10am-4pm on 4th June 2021

Update after the workshop [9 Jan 2021]: news on workshop

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In a continuation of a series of Middlesex-Egypt collaborations, London Digital Twin Research Centre (Middlesex University) has won a new Institutional Links grant under the Newton Fund Impact Scheme. The grant is led by Dr. Noha Saleeb, Associate Professor in Digital Technologies and Construction in partnership with Prof. Mohamed Marzouk, Professor of Construction Engineering and Management, Cairo University Egypt. The funding delivered by the British Council supports activities that aid in the development of Egypt’s economy using new digital twin technologies in alignment with the UN’s sustainability goals.

The project will be conducted simultaneously with the case study on Heritage assets in the UK and Egypt for mutual national benefits with the collaboration of industry and government parties namely Historic Environment Scotland, BurroHappold and Ministry of Housing Egypt.

Continue reading “Research Grant on Restoration of Heritage using Digital Twin”