Ontwikkeling, validatie en gebruik van een Digital Twin van een raffinaderijprocesinstallatie

The PhD position is part of an interdisciplinary project on the development of a digital twin concept for biorefinery technologies. The project focuses on a unique biorefinery technology developed at KU Leuven that converts wood to plastic building blocks and commodity chemicals. To turn such a successful lab-scale process into an industrial one, a series of capital intensive and laborious steps is classically required, which impedes rapid industrialization and, hence innovation. The Digital Twin concept, as currently developed within the mechanical engineering department at KU Leuven, is an interesting key enabling technology to tackle this challenge when integrated with chemical performance, resource efficiency, environmental and economic impacts. The PhD research targets to bring the digital concepts used in the mechanical field to a multidisciplinary field while keeping emphasis on the mechatronic and sustainability challenges. In doing so, a good interaction and interfacing strategy with the chemical process control deployed by a colleague researcher with the project is strived for. The numerical modeling of the plant and the required measurement strategy to feed the digital twin are key aspects of the work.