10 October 2024 -
On Thursday 10 October 2024, Guillaume Pronost will defend his doctoral thesis in amphitheatre 1 at ENSGSI by videoconference. The thesis is entitled:
Contributions of the digital twin for product-centred design and manufacturing using a DIT (Do-It-Together) approach.
This thesis was carried out as part of a doctoral contract co-supervised by Mauricio Camargo and Frédérique Mayer and co-supervised by Laurent Dupont.
This thesis focuses on the use of the Digital Twin as a technology for the real-time application of the “Product-Driven Control System” paradigm to the collaborative design and manufacturing of a product through 3D printing. This thesis is based on the results of the European project INEDIT, which aimed to explore and promote collaborative innovation in the manufacturing sector by leveraging the DIT (Do-It-Together) approach, inspired particularly by social manufacturing to surpass the DIY (Do-It-Yourself) approach. These approaches stimulate innovation and co-creation in manufacturing ecosystems, applied here to the furniture sector. The project demonstrated that the use of prototyping technologies such as 3D printing provides a tangible vision of the product throughout the process, supporting a collaborative approach by allowing continuous control and validation of business models during design. Furthermore, McFarlane’s work on the Product-Controlled System highlighted that observing the product during manufacturing enables validation of the process by the product defined in the design phase. However, a continuity gap exists between the co-design phase and the manufacturing phase, where visualization and interaction with the product are limited, compromising the collaborative nature.
In this thesis, we explore the use of a digital twin as a means of real-time observability of the physical reality of a product throughout its manufacturing phase, and we implement a production system control based on this physical reality and its design requirements. The originality of this work lies in making the product the orchestrator of this collaborative engineering, with its real-time digital representation allowing us to address unforeseen manufacturing situations during the design phase.
To validate this principle, an experimental case study on the additive manufacturing of a product was implemented. This highlighted the interest in direct observability of the physical state of the product, particularly its thermal state through temperature measurement, to model its dynamics and control the production tool based on the product’s usage requirements in terms of its strength.
However, to meet this requirement, it is necessary to deepen this dynamic through modeling (using behavioral or structural models) of the thermal behavior of the concerned product to observe and control phenomena influencing the product’s strength. A limitation of this approach is the need to go beyond the observation of simple raw data to truly understand the physical behavior of the product during manufacturing. To address this limitation, a physical model of the product’s thermal behavior has been proposed to observe and control its physical state during manufacturing.