South Korea’s leading battery maker LG Energy Solution is expected to apply Siemens’ smart factory solution LiveTwin to its plant currently under construction in the U.S. state of Tennessee.

Siemens’s LiveTwin solution is the German company’s digital twin technology that can reflect the real situation to the virtual space in one-hundredth of a second thanks to edge computing, a distributed computing paradigm that brings computation and data storage closer to the sources of data for fast response times, the company explained.

LGES is expected to be the first Korean firm to deploy Siemens’ digital twin solution in its plant at Ultium Cells LLC, its battery manufacturing joint venture with General Motors in Tennessee, the United States. This is a follow-up to a memorandum of understanding LGES signed last year with Siemens to join hands to upgrade the battery major’s manufacturing facilities to more intelligent and eco-friendly ones to improve the efficiency of battery production and reduce its carbon footprint. The Ultium Cells’ factory is expected to commence operation in 2023.

Digital manufacturing has become essential to solving complex production problems, reducing risk, and enhancing competition. As part of manufacturing process digitization, companies around the world like LGES accelerate the adoption of a digital twin technology that enables the operating system to analyze production processes from real-time data in virtual reality through simulation, machine learning and reasoning.

LiveTwin to be adopted to the LGES factory is an upgrade version with virtual sensors with high accuracy that can be equipped in various manufacturing environments, such as a furnace in a steel mill or a storage tank in a petrochemical firm, Siemens explained.

Siemens’ digital solution business achieved 5.6 billion euros ($5.68 billion) in sales last year, ranking 10th in the world. To enhance its digital business in Korea, Siemens opened the Korea Digital Enterprise Experience Center (KDEXc) in Seoul last month to showcase its digital twin and automation solutions. It has 31 digital experience centers around the world including the U.S., Europe, and China.

By Lee Yu-sup and Jenny Lee

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