Development of a diesel engine's digital twin for predicting propulsion system dynamics

A digital twin is the essential part of a recent and unavoidable trend in ship operation digitalisation. The digital twin is a virtual replica of real ship or a particular system that coexists with its physical counterpart and maps the dynamic behaviour in real-time. Thus, the digital twin combines physical space real-time data with a set of dynamic models representing the physical counterpart in the cyberspace. The problem of digital twin development is a trade-off between insight into the dynamic process and real-time execution constraint. This paper describes a modelling approach that combines continuous time-domain cycle-mean value engine model with the crank-angle resolved phenomenological combustion model, satisfying the real-time execution constraint. The set of conservation laws, notably energy and mass, supplemented with the phenomenological Wiebe combustion model, is treated in the integral form allowing transformation into a set of nonlinear algebraic equations. The solution of the resulting system exhibits fast speed and accuracy as compared with the traditional approach combining differential equations and Runge-Kutta solver. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.