Aerospace Industry Lessons for Mining Part 3: Driving costs down
This series of articles is dedicated to exploring the value of the digital twin in the mining industry by using the aerospace industry as an example: they have a product and we have a product, a product that we also need to get to a volatile and competitive market in the most cost-effective and sustainable way.
In Part 1, I explained how major aeronautical companies have used Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE® platform to create a digital twin inside a virtual twin experience to identify how to make their production rate flexible enough to quickly adapt to changing market needs and demands. Part 2 looked at how the platform helped the same companies improve supply chain visibility and on-time delivery.
This article looks at a third key question asked by manufacturers and suppliers within the aerospace industry that also resonates within the mining sector:
- How can we integrate new technologies to improve performance and meet demand while also driving costs down?
The issue
With commercial air traffic expected to double in the next 20 years, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) know they must ramp up aircraft production quickly. But they also know they can’t continue to make the same kind of planes in the same kind of way. Commercial air passengers today have made it clear that they want air travel that is less expensive, quieter, and less stressful, while also being greener and more sustainable.
To do all that, OEMs must find ways to integrate the new technologies required to build ever more advanced, complex, and capable aircraft — and remain competitive with a variety of new regional OEMs and start-ups.
To drive down costs and stay on top, established OEMs identified the need to correct inefficiencies in the way they traditionally conceptualised, designed, manufactured, tested, certified, and supported new aircraft.
Which is where Dassault Systèmes came in
Companies such as Boeing, Airbus, Bombardier, and Gulfstream were looking to lower development costs by:
- improving engineering productivity
- reducing development time, and
- speeding up product definition and delivery.
They adopted Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE®as their network platform because it offers a system digital mockup (S-DMU) that provides a common reference across the entire development process.
A standard DMU is a digital 2D or 3D model of a physical asset, process, or system, such as an aircraft, a mine, a production line, or a processing plant, for its entire lifecycle. From the DMU, engineers can then visualise and analyse the spatial consistency and progress of the product — something that today’s CAD and PDM systems alone cannot do.
Which is great. But Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE® S-DMU is even better because it enables:
- Universal collaboration
In traditional aircraft development, each section of the design team had its own DMU and everyone worked separately. But the lack of communication not only resulted in extended design time, it also introduced errors that drove up costs.
By consolidating all development platforms under the 3DEXPERIENCE® umbrella, aircraft manufacturers are now able to ensure that everyone involved in development has access to the common data reference, works on the same design platform, and communicates in a single environment.
The result: synchronisation now takes minutes instead of days and there are far fewer costly errors.
This kind of collaboration is valuable for mining operations, too, because it allows all mining departments to work together on a single digital model (digital twin). By having access to the same single source of truth, every team knows immediately when new information is generated and is therefore able to react quickly to adapt their respective models to the new information. For example, when one teams adds new drillhole information, another team can immediately use that information to generate an updated geological model, which yet another team can then use to quickly develop a new block model and a new long-term plan.
The single platform ensures a streamlined process that accelerates the resources-to-reserves transformation and reduces the time teams must use to check quality and coordinate different sources of information.
- Increased efficiency
An S-DMU on the 3DEXPERIENCE® platform has also allowed aerospace OEMs to integrate manufacturing with the design office.
Any changes made by the design office are now communicated to manufacturing in real-time, dramatically reducing both tooling production time and requests from manufacturing for redesign work.
To apply this to mining, by working inside a unique platform on a single digital model, mine planning and mine operations teams would be permanently connected, so that, for example, operations engineers will see new grade control data immediately and be able to use it quickly to develop new short-term plans that lead to more efficient and sustainable mine production.
- Simplified processes and improved quality
Through an S-DMU on the 3DEXPERIENCE® platform, aircraft manufacturers now design and simulate a product, from top to bottom and inside out — including structures, parts, sub-systems, and system designs — entirely in 3D.
Airbus, for example, now designs each aircraft’s structure, installation systems, tubing, composite parts, and electrical systems in 3D, which has:
- ensured complete integration of new technologies
- reduced the time needed to update an installation plan by 50%
- decreased the design change requests generated when creating manual 2D drawings by 25%, and
- allowed engineers to install, fit, and verify all systems digitally, long before physical installation, significantly decreasing the number of costly mistakes and delays.
Engineers at Airbus use the 3DEXPERIENCE® platform.https://www.3ds.com/assets/invest/2020-02/CaseStudy_Airbus_2013_EN_HD.pdf]" data-type="external" rel="nofollow">(Source)
This same method of designing and simulating a product entirely in 3D can also simplify processes, improve quality, and reduce costs in mining.
Through a digital twin inside a virtual twin experience, mines can generate thousands of simulations in a matter of hours to visualise how a mine plan is going to behave when variables (controlled and uncontrolled) change. The result is multiple and more stable plans with different risk levels and cost probabilities, enabling the mine company to make the best possible decisions.
Next in this series
Using a system digital mockup on Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE® network platform has helped the aerospace drive down development costs by some 40% to 50%.
In the final two articles in the Aerospace Industry Lessons for Mining series, I will explain how we helped the aerospace industry answer these remaining questions:
- How can we develop a competitive technology and services portfolio quickly and with minimal risk?
- How can we deliver on our economic, environmental, and social promises?
