Exploring Digital Twin Technology in turbomachinery: A review

Abstract

This review paper explores how digital twin technology has evolved and its increasing applications while focusing on turbomachinery, including pumps, gas turbines, steam turbines, and wind turbines. The paper highlights the impact of digital twins on performance optimization, reducing downtime, and fault detection. Digital twins are virtual prototypes of physical systems that can simulate real-time operation, monitoring, and predictive maintenance to achieve high-value operational improvements. Advanced methodologies, like hybrid modeling, data-driven approaches, and machine learning techniques such as CNN, RNN, and LSTM models, are underlined in this paper, which ensures better performance in fault detection, performance prediction, and process optimization. Such approaches have been used to provide an accurate prognosis for gas turbines, renewable energy forecasting, and the real-time estimation of unsteady flow states in pumping stations. Most importantly, the integration of ML algorithms into digital twin frameworks gives much promise for improving turbomachinery operation in various directions: efficiency, reliability, and cost-effectiveness. Because of that, digital twin technology will be very promising toward the changing of present industrial strategies of maintenance to proactive, data-driven management of equipment in advanced engineering practices.