Sustainable Design is Built on the Digital Twin

Siemens has submitted this article. Written by Eryn Devola, Vice President of Sustainability, Siemens Digital Industries.

Good design has meant many different things over the years from ornamentation and craftsmanship to sleek lines and manufacturability. The next evolution in the definition of good design is the inclusion of sustainability as a foundational requirement, alongside the more traditional needs of cost, utility and attractiveness.

That is a reasonable step when looking at consumer expectations, but what does that mean for a business looking to design a sustainable product? Good design requires an understanding of the sustainability impact from the very beginning, and evolving that understanding throughout its full lifecycle. It means having actionable information on the resources that will be used in manufacturing, how the product will be used in the real world, and what happens when it reaches its end of life. That requires adopting a holistic and digital view of how products and services are developed, used and decommissioned. It starts with an integrated digital toolset, with connections to the complete value chain, and a process for accurate and verifiable understanding of the product from the earliest stages of development—creating a collective intelligence built on the digital twin.

Having a virtual representation of the product from early design stages provides a seamless flow of data between the real and digital world, constructing a holistic view of sustainability impacts along the value chain. This provides an avenue for continuous simulation, prediction, analysis and optimization. The digital twin approach to sustainable product design allows for confident decision making for the more-interconnected optimizations of resources, waste and CO₂ emissions. 

Digital twins are used throughout design to simulate, predict and optimize the product and production systems before investing in physical prototypes and assets. This workflow is being adopted across a wide range of applications and industrial sectors to maximize the resource potential of businesses—including construction, transportation and manufacturing. Cox Marine has deployed scalable IT systems and an end-to-end digitalized design process to enable performance and maintenance monitoring of their products in real time. They were able to design a marine diesel outboard engine that is 25 percent more fuel efficient and that lasts three times longer than comparable models. Using a fully digital development stack, Cox Marine only needed to create one prototype to validate their designs, rather than the usual 24—saving hundreds of thousands in costs, months of development time, and the associated emissions of those saved prototypes.

Designing the products of tomorrow sustainably will not occur in a vacuum. Good design must include manufacturing, logistics, decommissioning and every other facet of the value chain. Some of the best examples of sustainable design are around circularity. Designers are considering recyclability, separation of components, reusability or increased durability, use of recycled content, and support for replacement parts or repairs from the early concept stages. The decisions made here have immense and lasting effects on the final sustainability of a product. Making the right decision requires a holistic understanding of the product, process, usage and end-of-life. To get that information in the hands of designers early on, businesses are connecting industrial ecosystems.

Connected industrial ecosystems help designers understand metrics on carbon intensity and resource utilization up and down the value chain, drawing on data sources ranging from suppliers and distributors to energy producers and recyclers. This information can be used to inform their digital twins and capture new opportunities for enterprises to partner, co-create and achieve sustainable goals. Once enterprises leverage data from across the product lifecycle and industrial ecosystems to inform their digital twins, they can model a path to better sustainability outcomes. And having a comprehensive view of product lifecycle allows organizations to define holistic sustainability indicators that balance effective carbon footprints, performance and profitability, whilst optimizing these globally and in real time.

Tracking the energy and resource efficiency of an enterprise empowers users to optimize products and processes to make the most of existing manufacturing resources—perhaps minimizing the operations or employing more energy efficient machines. There is also the collection of carbon footprint data to employ and find out what areas of the supply chain have the most impact compared to the idealized estimates made in the first iteration of a project or from previous products. These types of data points help businesses refine their digital twin and provide the best version of their sustainable product. Minimizing energy consumption and using less material has a direct and immediate impact on the bottom line for businesses, while at the same time setting them up for a leadership position in the sustainable design revolution.

Sustainable design practices are a growing source of competitive advantage in business and the digital twin will be a valuable asset on the journey. The choices made in early development of a product define roughly 80 percent of a product’s overall environmental impact, whether it is the materials used, the processes employed, the logistics required or use over time. The digital twin supports the improvement and sustainability of the design phase, and then continues across the entire value chain. Building the digital twin with accurate and reliable data from across the connected industrial ecosystem ensures designers can optimize as early as possible for the emissions, the energy and the material consumption of the product over its lifecycle. And the more a business collects and analyzes data to optimize the digital twin, the more they will be able to create a competitive edge in their industry segment.

To learn more about how the Siemens Digital Industries solution for sustainability is helping industries grow forward, check out the Sustainable Industries topic page.

About the Author 

Eryn Devola is the Vice President of Sustainability for Siemens Digital Industries, where she leads the Sustainability horizontal market to manage the strategy for profitable sustainability for Siemens and its customers. Devola has been part of the Siemens team since 2012, most recently as the North America Director of Sales for Siemens Large Drive Applications. Her career includes roles of increasing responsibility across quality, plant management, operations and sales.   Devola has long had a passion for sustainable product development and production. She completed an NFS Fellowship focused on Environmentally Conscious Manufacturing and has applied the knowledge she gained there to many roles in her career. Devola has a bachelor’s and master’s in mechanical engineering from Michigan Technology University, and an MBA from the University of Louisville.