Digital twin of an aluminium recycling plant

The problem

An aluminium recycling plant only works if the decoating line, the furnace, the charging system and the fume treatment are matched to each other and to a scrap quality that varies week to week. Discovering a mismatch during commissioning means changing installed equipment.

What we did

We built a complete digital twin of the plant from the process design and used it to simulate operation before execution: material flow, thermal behaviour and the interaction between the charging cycle and the melting process.

The model was then used to test the cases that worry an operator rather than the nominal case: a heavier scrap mix, a slower charging cycle, an interruption downstream.

Outcome

Design validation before commissioning rather than after it. The value of a twin is not the visualisation; it is that a question about capacity or a bottleneck gets answered while changing the answer is still cheap.