UWA announced the grant last Friday which will give students and academics global, cutting-edge technology used by some of the world's leading companies to boost local innovation, particularly in energy, engineering and shipbuilding.
The grant will help develop the LNG Futures Facility, a national resource based on a fully functioning LNG plant that will provide an entirely new training capability for tomorrow's workforce.
Lead researcher UWA Professor Eric May from UWA's Centre for Energy said the software grant would allow UWA to deliver education across all engineering disciplines in a completely new way.
"In the area of natural gas processing, which is incredibly important to our state, it will allow Australian innovators access to facilities essential for technology development," he said.
"Such capabilities will help transition Australia's resource industries beyond the export of raw materials and into the delivery of knowledge, expertise and innovation."
UWA Vice Chancellor Professor Dawn Freshwater said the software grant from Siemens was a remarkable contribution to the education of UWA students, now and into the future.
DNV GL oil and gas country manager Australia, NZ and PNG Richard Palmer told Energy News after addressing an oil and gas industry digitisation breakfast in Perth attended by numerous Woodside Petroleum employees, among others, in May that a cloud-based "digital twin" would enable a new generation of advanced predictive analytics for industry.
The digital twin integrates data from many different software products, and Palmer said data smart asset solutions were critical to reducing operational costs.
"It has been done in elements (power supply systems, DP systems, blowout preventers) but not as a whole unit or plant … this is only a matter of time," Palmer told Energy News.
"Poor information management is often a hidden cost, accounting for up to a fifth of operational budgets, while a single unscheduled downtime can cost millions of dollars per day."
DNV GL believes the digital twin will be a single source for all asset information, including physical properties, mill certificates from steel production, construction inspections and acceptance tests, the operational business process state, production demand history and projections, risk levels, remaining life estimate and structural reliability.
Via Internet of Things technologies and data historians, the digital twin will also provide dynamic updates on condition and operational parameter states.
The digital twin leverages existing investments in enterprise asset management and design software by linking directly to this information and delivering it to the ecosystem of DNV GL - Software analytics applications in a consistent manner. The configuration of this ensures the most up-to-date information, and is a core part of the service.
Then in August, Energy News was told the newly-rebadged Hexagon PPM's recently launched Smart Digital Asset module called "Collaboration" was effectively an information management platform that will allow owners to create and maintain a "digital twin" of their assets.
This is crucial for operators and suppliers alike to access the next wave of future tech that Hexagon sees on the horizon like extended reality and big data.
