Unison Tube Bending Blog: A digital twin in the world of tube bending

What do people mean when they talk about a Digital Twin?

Blog by Alan Pickering.

In an attempt to streamline a process in the Tube Bending world, a Digital Twin is basically a CAD version of your physical tube bending machine, that runs the same software as the machine and behaves in the same way

Opt2Sim is our own version of this.

What problems are you trying to solve by having a Digital Twin?

The main objective is to make sure that Design Is Master, ie. what is drawn in the design office is what is produced on the shop floor.

This is so that there are no production surprises downstream.

If you can ensure that the geometry of the part can be made without collisions with the machine, floor or surrounding area, you’ll solve one of the main causes of scrap parts and all the noise that it creates – Scrap Reports, Re-issuing Material, New Stock Allocation, Environmental Impact…..etc

When you use the clever Tech Routines that are available in the Unibend control software you could test more of the complex parts and program offline so that you don’t take up valuable machine production time.

Opt2Sim also includes the ability to bring in STEP files.