Live Digital Twin for Hydraulic Structures Fatigue Estimation

Abstract

Maintaining hydraulic structures such as dams, penstocks, or water lock gates in operating conditions and optimizing their maintenance costs are key issues for energy production or river navigation. The ultimate objective is to know the real state of fatigue and damage of the structure and identify any related anomalies. In this paper, we introduce a digital twin, for fatigue evaluation merging measured data obtained with an embedded sensor network and a 3D numerical model that converts in real time measured data into fatigue. After 3 years of R&D collaboration between CNR and Morphosense in the maintenance of navigation lock gates or dam gates, this presentation exposes how the proposed Live Digital Twin solution contributes to fatigue evaluation and more generally to global structural monitoring in dealing with fundamental issues of hydraulic structures: risk assessment, maintenance in operating conditions and maintenance costs optimization. After a context and state of the art introduction, the second part will detail the system overview. In the third part, the monitoring system will be addressed.