EnginSoft (Italy)

Abstract The objective of this chapter is to describe the strategic action line related to digital technologies for production processes and systems (LI7). In particular, this chapter proposes research and innovation priorities aimed at innovative digital architectures for the monitoring, control and management of manufacturing activities and related assets, modelling new products/services and production processes, use of Al, Big data and adequate Cybersecurity systems. More specifically, the research and innovation priorities are based on the assumption that criteria need to be defined for the management and transformation of raw production data into strategic information for decision makers, identifying the information to be collected from each digital access point by means of suitable enabling technologies and then delivered as appropriate. Digital platforms and cybersecurity also play a significant role in the definition of dynamic supply chain models.

The rapid changes in social, political and economic policies in today’s European landscape create an increasingly turbulent and demanding market. In response to disruptive internal and external factors, the manufacturing industry strives to establish integrated, intelligent and digital solutions, targeting sustainable, reconfigurable and resilient systems capable of swiftly ramping up to maximum production capacity, enabling rapid adaptations in product functionality, process technology and production volume. In this context, Digital Twins (DTs) are means to map complex manufacturing systems and process chains for fast and efficient reconfiguration of production lines and entire value chains. This paper proposes a holistic architecture for digital twins spanning various hierarchical levels: (i) product level, (ii) process level, (iii) system level, and (iv) system of systems level. The benefits and challenges of the proposed approach are discussed in a real case study from automotive industry.

The OPTIMA project aims to port and optimize industrial applications and a set of open-source libraries into two novel FPGA-populated HPC systems. Target applications are from the domains of robotics simulation, underground analysis and computational fluid dynamics (CFD), where data processing is based on differential equations, matrix-matrix and matrix-vector operations. Moreover, the OPTIMA OPen Source (OOPS) library will support basic linear algebraic operations, sparse matrix-vector arithmetic, as well as computer-aided engineering (CAE) solvers. The OPTIMA target platforms are JUMAX, an HPC system that couples an AMD Epyc Server with Maxeler FPGA-based Dataflow Engines (DFEs), and server class machines with Alveo FPGA cards installed. Experimental results show that performance on robotic simulation can be enhanced up to 1.2x, and CFD calculations up to 4.7x. Finally, BLAS L1 routines are improved up to 7x, with a performance-per-Watt ratio boost of more than 40x compared to multi-threaded software routines from the Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL) suite when executed on an Intel Xeon server-class machine.

In this article, we discuss the modelling of elastic and electromagnetic wave propagation through one‐dimensional and two‐dimensional structured piezoelectric solids. Dispersion and the effect of piezoelectricity on the group velocity and positions of stop bands are studied in detail. We will also analyse the reflection and transmission associated with the problem of scattering of an elastic wave by a heterogeneous piezoelectric stack. Special attention is given to the occurrence of transmission resonances in finite stacks and their dependence on a piezoelectric effect. A two‐dimensional doubly periodic piezoelectric checkerboard structure is subsequently introduced, for which the dispersion surfaces for Bloch waves have been constructed and analysed, with the emphasis on the dynamic anisotropy and special features of standing waves within the piezoelectric structure. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper presents a 3D Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modeling of flow, combustion and heat transfer processes into an internal enclosure acting as a combustion chamber, confined by the newly patented air cooled “corner ring”, the lower shaft vertical side walls, the vault and the limestone packed bed, located in a vertical twin-shaft regenerative lime kiln. The numerical simulation is restricted only to the kiln first start-up preliminary phase, with the goal to optimize the thermo-fluid dynamics patterns established during the first heat-up of wet gunning refractory concrete lining of the air cooled “corner ring”, to avoid refractory damages. The present work is performed in the frame of the commercial general-purpose code ANSYS-CFX R14.5. The CFD model is run under transient flow conditions accomplished by the drying burners operated in single-stage “on-off” control mode, to fit at the best the heat-up curve by optimization of the fluid dynamics patterns, with the goal to prevent local hot spots on the refractory lining. The industrial data collected through the supervision system and the local provisional instrumentation on the vertical twin-shaft regenerative lime kiln, model RD15, commissioned in India on September last year, are used to set the test-case and to partially validate the numerical simulation results. This CFD numerical simulation represents an useful engineering tool, on behalf of refractory designer and commissioning engineer, for the prediction of the refractory lining behavior during the kiln first start-up.