Aircraft Engine Digital Twin

This is a video of an interactive visualisation that was used by EPCOR (part of KLM) at the Dubai Airshow. The goal was to get people excited for their predictive maintenance system and show their data in a new and engaging way.

Design Phase: Uncovering the Challenge

EPCOR has a predicitive maintenance system that shows many graphs related to the engine condition. However, the EPCOR engineers had a hard time convincing the aircraft planners that now is the time to service an engine.

The challenge here is that engineers have years of hands-on experience with APUs and know them inside out. They can mentally visualise what happens when the oil pressure rises beyond a certain level, which parts are affected and how this influences the working of the entire APU. Aircraft planners don't have this experience and the dozens of graphs that an engineer will show them are meaningless to them without context.

Concepts and References

Final Results

The resulting application has been used internally and externally at the Dubai Air Show to convince clients of the use of predictive maintenance. The visualisation gave people a better understanding of how an APU worked and made it easier for them to visualise the real-life impact of an abnormal sensor reading. The application has also been shown to Pieter Elbers, CEO of KLM.