UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The newly established Digital Twins Hub, housed under the Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS), has launched a new program to spotlight University researchers utilizing digital twins in innovative ways and to bridge the literacy gap between emerging technologies and undergraduate education.
The Faculty-in-Residence Program is currently featuring a team of researchers who are integrating digital twins technologies into a project with environmental impact. At the end of the year, the research team and students will showcase their work.
The Digital Twins Hub is one of five research hubs housed under ICDS that seek to enable and accelerate cross- and interdisciplinary collaborations, focus research on high-priority challenges and societal needs and invest in computational infrastructure and workforce development. The hub is also affiliated with the Cocoziello Institute of Real Estate Innovation. Digital twins are integrated, dynamic virtual representations of physical systems that combine models and data to reflect, predict and inform the system’s behavior across its lifecycle, enabled by bidirectional data flows between the physical and digital domains.
"With the Faculty-in-Residence Program, we are bringing faculty members who are working on interesting, novel applications of digital twins to the Center for Immersive Experiences lab, where they can set up their own digital twin, and gain exposure for their work while also educating undergraduate students about emerging technologies that can create real impact,” said Jessica Menold, Digital Twins Hub director, ICDS co-hire and associate professor of mechanical engineering and of industrial and manufacturing engineering.
While in its initial stages, the faculty-in-residence program aligns with both the hub’s and ICDS’ missions by highlighting Penn State experts from diverse fields to drive innovation, use advanced technologies to solve complex research problems and prepare students for the future.
“We are seeing digital twins be used more in various industries; it’s being used in the built environment, in industrial operations and even in medical simulations,” Menold said. “Students need to learn what this technology is and the capabilities of these systems, and we need to ensure they are prepared to go into an industry and effectively use these advanced technologies.”
The first Faculty-in-Residence Program participants are Margaret Busse, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and Institute for Energy and the Environment co-funded faculty, and Ilya Kovalenko, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and of industrial and manufacturing engineering. They are spotlighting their project, “Water Evaluation and Treatment Digital Twin: (WET-DT): A Framework for Robust, Predictive Process Controls for Water Treatment Plants.”
“Water treatment is essential for human health,” Busse said. “Everyone needs safe, clean drinking water, and yet, it’s one of our infrastructure systems that goes underfunded. Many of our treatment systems rely on failing infrastructure while trying to deal with emerging contaminants. It is very hard to overhaul these systems because we rely on them daily.”
The research team aims to develop a digital twin with controls that could monitor and predict changes in water treatment, optimize the system for performance and hereby reducing cost and energy waste, to better understand contaminants and pathogens and, ultimately, treat the water for safety.
The team includes two undergraduate students and one graduate student: Cameron Clark, fourth-year mechanical engineering major; Adelaide Orsetti, third-year industrial engineering major; and Hongliang Li, doctoral candidate in industrial engineering.
Through the program, the students are gaining hands-on research experience by building sensors and infrastructure needed to read sensors, creating the digital twin and understanding how it will communicate with a real system. The students, alongside their mentors Busse and Kovalenko, will also present their work to others at Penn State.
“The students provide different insights into the research,” Kovalenko said. “Through hands-on physical implementations, the students can directly apply concepts learned in class and observe how digital twin models interact with real systems, reinforcing their understanding through practical experience.”
Busse added that the mentorship element also provides space for students to learn other skills like creative problem solving and how to make decisions when tackling complex challenges like building controls and modeling water flow — skills they otherwise wouldn't have had the opportunity to build upon without the program.
Learn more about the Faculty-in-Residence Program by visiting the ICDS website or emailing Menold at jdm5407@psu.edu.