A luxury car manufacturer from southern German Stuttgart treads innovative paths with their project “Digital Factory”: In their plant in Sindelfingen the manufacturers use digital methods and processes for factory floor construction. In their factory planning building, they have installed a “digital planning room”, in which specialists from all corporate divisions meet for interdisciplinary discussions on construction and alteration of factory floors and production plants. Planners of halls, shell constructions, installations and logistics are sitting in a semicircle in front of a panorama Power Wall. Through their 3D spectacles, they gain a detailed insight into planned buildings, parts or plants. Single buildings can be zoomed in or even visited by way of a virtual walk through the future factory floors.
The panorama Power Wall is 6 metres long and 2,20 metres high – which is nearly the size of a football goal, and its technology makes it one of the world’s most modern Power Walls. Six Christie HD8K projectors are working behind the screen: By way of rear projection, they deliver three-dimensional images of factory floors which, as yet, only exist on the computer. In two cluster systems, they form a 4K Power Wall with an integrated 2K Power Wall in the centre of the screen. With the help of soft-edge blending, the planners can either watch one large picture of the future factory or use the image’s centre for additional shows, such as conference calls, PowerPoint presentations, TV broadcasts or video films.
People and Data can be brought together
“Digital Factory Planning” means more than just an impressive 3D visualization. Virtual Reality is used here as a precise and fast tool with which all factory components can be represented and verified in one digital experimental model.
Through the digital preparation work, errors can be detected in good time, since the data of all technical fields are compared in the virtual planning phase. The special thing about digital factory planning is that people and data are brought together at the same time.
In order to make this possible, all companies involved in the construction of the factory – heating engineers and electricians as well as equipment providers – must deliver their planning data in digital form. The data of 50 to 60 providers are digitally captured in a consistent data structure. To be sure, this is a considerable amount of work in the starting phase of a project, but it will be compensated for by future time and cost savings during factory construction.
Usage of New Technology
The Power Wall has been set up by the experts of TMP Mediagroup based in Glashütten, Germany, who are specialists for 3D installations. For the passive stereo installation, TMP chose the Christie HD8K with 8,000 ANSI lumens and a contrast ratio of 1,500-2,000:1. The reliability and technical maturity of the 3-Chip DLP projector plays an important role for TMP Managing Director Manfred Reich.
In order to get even more realistic and brilliant pictures, Manfred Reich and his team built a 3D filter directly into the projectors’ engines. This technical solution has been patented by TMP. Now the planning specialists on site enjoy a hitherto unknown presentation quality when they put on the Infitec spectacles. It makes the experience of immersion in the virtual world of the future factory even more realistic.
The Digital Factory Planning uses yet another internal invention which is the VEO-Factory software. This VR software visualizes the data that have been created with the help of Microstation, which is a Bentley software that allows for a three-dimensional planning of buildings and halls. The research experts have refined the software to meet the requirements of Digital Factory Planning. VEO-Factory is able to move several thousand millions of polychromes in real time. With the help of this software, the planning experts can represent the digital parts of the complete factory quickly and comfortably in a photorealistic 3D image and process their data.
The advantages of this kind of digital factory planning are obvious: Through digitalization, the period of time that passes from the idea to the finished product becomes a lot shorter.