A few minutes of calculation instead of waiting several weeks

Whether in steel production, powder metallurgy or various chemical reactors: complex chemical processes play a major role in many industrial sectors and should therefore be understood and predicted as accurately as possible. Thomas Lichtenegger from the new CD Laboratory for Data-assisted simulations of complex flows at Johannes Kepler University Linz is therefore researching, with the support of commercial partners PLANSEE SE, Primetals Technologies Austria GmbH, voestalpine Stahl GmbH and EMMI AI GmbH, the use of so-called “digital twins” for data- and AI-driven simulation of precisely these processes.

These “twins” are numerical representations of real industrial plants and, fed by sensor data on the physical plant’s current state, are intended to predict its future state – and do so in real time, rather than taking as long as traditional simulations! “A few minutes of calculation instead of waiting several weeks”, as Federal Minister Wolfgang Hattmannsdorfer (BMWET) puts it. This basic research will make an important contribution to ensuring that industrial processes can be better controlled, designed and optimised in the future, which will contribute to both economic efficiency and environmental sustainability (decarbonisation, “green steel”), benefiting all parties.