Engineers are embracing digital transformation as a way to reduce carbon footprints, and it’s easier than you think.
Siemens Digital Industries Software has sponsored this post.
If the pandemic has taught organizations one thing, it’s that digital transformations are the key to overcoming global challenges. Those businesses that were easily able to transfer operations from on-location to their employees’ homes had a clear advantage when lockdowns started. As for those that usually access work from home, the first mandatory day out of the office was—mostly—like any other.
In the wake of COVID-19, much of the public consciousness has shifted to another global challenge: the environment and climate change. A lot of this is because the trends in recent years are becoming harder to avoid—even in the United States. According to a 2020 paper in Science, global warming pushed what would have been a moderate drought in the southwestern U.S. into one of the worst megadroughts since the 1500s.
Companies need to act to combat climate change, and not just to create the appearance, but to actually ensure the sustainability and success of their businesses in a changing world. These organizations can’t offset emissions forever—there is only so much space to plant trees. To go green, companies need to fundamentally change the way they build products and do business.
Considerations about sustainability should always be done in balance with cost, quality, and time. Once that is done, the path to a green company often starts with the engineering and product design teams. The challenge is that designing for sustainability, or eco-design, is a relatively new concept for the engineering profession. But—just like surviving COVID-19—with the right digital transformations, combatting climate change is possible. Once engineers designing products have the best data and the right tools, environmentally sustainable design isn’t much different than designing for any other criteria such as cost, quality or time.
The Tools Engineers Need for Eco-Design
The more processes that organizations operate digitally, the more control, access and insights they have on their systems. With tools like model-based systems engineering (MBSE), product lifecycle management (PLM) and the digital thread, it is possible to produce an exceedingly accurate digital twin of any process, product or operation.
“Companies who have been on this digital transformation journey for a while are already using, to a great extent, all this information,” says Nand Kochhar Vice President of Automotive and Transportation Industry at Siemens Digital Industries Software. “It’s a key driver because you want every product to be better than the previous product. You want to make sure you don’t repeat mistakes. And these digital twin technologies get data and insights into key things to improve those products.”
One application of a digital twin could be to improve the bottom line. By producing a digital twin of a process, engineers can gain insights into how much it would cost to purchase, operate, fix, scrap and even replace the system. They can then iterate changes on the digital twin to gain better insights into how they can best operate and design the process. But it doesn’t have to be only dollars and cents. Sustainability insights can also be made.
“Sustainability is just another important initiative and there are several applications of that across industries, from improving energy efficiency to tracking the sustainability of the entire supply chain from raw materials to finished products,” says Kochhar. “The ability to track sustainability is very important and there are many different angles that contribute from the product design, from where you eliminate waste to light weighting.”
How to Use Digital Twins to Optimize for Sustainability
So, once you have a digital twin of an operation, how do you translate that into changes that improve the overall sustainability of a system? A simple approach is to search for inefficiencies within the system. The less energy a system uses and the fewer materials it consumes, the more sustainable it will become.
Kochhar used the example of a popular soda company. To be more sustainable, they could investigate the energy management and water consumption within a bottling plant. By making a digital twin of the plant, the company can test operational changes virtually without ever risking the real product and equipment on the floor. It’s a remarkably similar process to the one used to reduce costs.
But the systems being optimized don’t have to be in the physical world. Engineers can also use digital twins to assess products before they are built. Not only will this save the environmental impact of producing a physical prototype, but it can also help to optimize all the direct and indirect emissions that go into making, transporting and operating the product.
By simulating the product upfront using a comprehensive digital twin, engineers can better design products for the circular economy. Simulation enables earlier design choices that make it easier to disassemble, reuse, recycle or return the product to its raw materials at its end of life.
As another means to assess the impact of products and services, many companies have started to integrate carbon footprint and environmental lifecycle assessment tools into their PLM and digital twin tools. Siemens is a recent example in creating these holistic sustainability indicators. It now collaborates with the climate technology company Sustamize to add a carbon footprint calculator to the Teamcenter software portfolio.
“Instead of cost, you’re tracking CO2 performance, or any of the sustainability metrics you want to track,” says Kochhar. “Having the ability to access all this data allows you to create those scenarios, whatever your objective is, and helps you achieve them.”
As a result of this partnership, any organization that uses Teamcenter to design their products will have most of the information on that PLM system needed to produce a lifecycle-based environmental assessment of the product they are designing, as they design it.
Kochhar adds that Siemens also offer a blockchain-based tool that tracks and documents the entire supply chain of products and services. He says, “These tools help engineers identify and calculate the reliable CO2 footprint of the products across the entire supply chain in a scalable manner and with real data.”
When engineers have an idea of the spots in the product’s supply chain that produce the most CO2 emissions, they can see how changes to that supply chain can improve not only their own operations but also the industry itself. For instance, they can begin to ask questions like, “if I make this part from aluminum instead of plastic or steel, how will that affect the lifecycle impact of the product? Will the reduced weight improve the overall fuel efficiency to offset the emissions used to process the new raw materials?”
“You can carry that [thinking] forward to design, manufacture and operations,” says Kochhar. “And within those operations, you can bring the angles of delivering safety, quality and sustainability goals from leveraging digital twin technologies.”
To learn more about how Siemens digital twin technologies can help the environment, visit Siemens.com.
