Is it possible to develop a digital twin for noise monitoring in manufacturing?

Abstract

Noise monitoring is important in the context of manufacturing because it can help maintain a safe and healthy workspace for employees. Current approaches for noise monitoring in manufacturing are based on acoustic sensors, whose measured sound pressure levels (SPL) are shown as bar/curve charts and acoustic heat maps. In such a way, the noise emission and propagation process is not fully addressed. This paper proposes a digital twin (DT) for noise monitoring in manufacturing using augmented reality (AR) and the phonon tracing method (PTM). In the proposed PTM/AR-based DT, the noise is represented by 3D particles (called phonons) emitting and traversing in a spatial domain. Using a mobile AR device (HoloLens 2), users are able to visualize and interact with the noise emitted by machine tools. To validate the feasibility of the proposed PTM/AR-based DT, two use cases are carried out. The first use case is an offline test, where the noise data from a machine tool are first acquired and used for the implementation of PTM/AR-based DT with different parameter sets. The result of the first use case is the understanding between the AR performance of HoloLens 2 (frame rate) and the setting of the initial number of phonons and sampling frequency. The second use case is an online test to demonstrate the in-situ noise monitoring capability of the proposed PTM/AR-based DT. The result shows that our PTM/AR-based DT is a powerful tool for visualizing and assessing the real-time noise in manufacturing systems.