Wireless Power, Real-World Impact: Enabling Digital Twins Across Industries

Digital twins have come a long way since their inception, transforming from a theoretical concept into a powerful tool that revolutionizes industries. Today, digital twins play a key role in sectors like manufacturing, healthcare, and retail by offering real-time insights into and enhanced operational efficiency of supply chain interactions. However, one of the biggest challenges to realizing their full potential for supply chain applications has been powering the many IoT devices required to generate critical data. Energous wireless power solutions addresses this issue, unlocking new possibilities for digital twins across a wide range of industries.

Digital Twins: Then and Now

The concept of the digital twin traces its roots back to NASA’s Apollo missions in the 1960s. Faced with the daunting task of remotely monitoring and maintaining spacecraft, NASA engineers developed virtual models—digital twins—of the spacecraft to simulate and solve potential problems from Earth. These early digital twins enabled NASA to troubleshoot remotely and, in some cases, save missions that encountered technical difficulties.

While these models laid the foundation, digital twins didn’t enter mainstream industrial use until the early 2000s, when they started appearing in manufacturing and aerospace sectors. In these early implementations, companies used digital twins to create virtual replicas of physical machines and processes, allowing for simulations, predictive maintenance, and real-time optimization. However, the technology faced limitations, mainly due to the lack of computing power and the difficulty in consistently gathering real-time data.

Today, digital twins have evolved into essential tools for various applications, particularly in supply chain management. Modern digital twins provide businesses with accurate, real-time representations of their physical assets, inventory, and processes. 

• Operational Efficiency: By simulating different scenarios, they help businesses optimize processes, reduce bottlenecks, and streamline operations.

• Predictive Maintenance: Digital twins allow for proactive identification of potential problems before they disrupt the supply chain, reducing downtime and repair costs.

• Cost Savings: Optimized operations, combined with reduced downtime and more efficient use of resources, result in significant cost savings for businesses.

However, even in their current form, digital twins face significant challenges, particularly regarding data collection. IoT devices, which supply the data needed to keep digital twins updated, often rely on wired power or battery-operated sensors or tags. Maintaining these power sources across a large fleet is cumbersome and massively time consuming, leading to data gaps when sensors lose power or need frequent battery replacements.

Connecting to IoT Devices

Energous wireless power solutions overcome this hurdle by delivering continuous, reliable power to the IoT devices that feed vital data to digital twins, ensuring seamless updates without interruptions.

With Energous’ scalable, over-the-air (OTA) wireless power network (WPN) technology, IoT sensors can be wirelessly powered and supported across wide areas, eliminating the need for constant battery changes or complex wiring systems. This WPN not only ensures continuous power but also facilitates a seamless flow of data at the edge, enabling uninterrupted data collection. As a result, digital twins can deliver real-time insights with enhanced accuracy, reliability, and efficiency

Energous’ wireless power technology ensures that IoT devices maintain an uninterrupted power supply, eliminating the risk of outages or downtime. This constant power enables the devices to deliver 24/7 data streams, ensuring that digital twins operate efficiently with real-time information. The scalability of our solutions also allows businesses to easily deploy IoT devices across large areas, enhancing the versatility and reach of digital twins. By removing the need for frequent battery replacements or complex wiring installations, companies can significantly reduce maintenance costs, allowing them to focus on optimizing operations and improving overall performance.

Consider a global supply chain equipped with hundreds of IoT sensors deployed across factories, warehouses, and fleets, delivering real-time data to enable smarter decision-making. All of this is worthless without a consistent power source as sensor breakdowns can lead to massive gaps in data collection.

With Energous’ wireless power technology, this issue disappears. IoT sensors are powered wirelessly over-the-air, ensuring that they collect data 24/7. This constant data stream enables the sensors to function at full capacity, providing real-time insights into the entire supply chain. Businesses can then optimize operations, minimize downtime, and improve decision-making, all while reducing maintenance costs by eliminating the need for battery replacements.

Enabling a Smart Supply Chain

The potential for digital twins in supply chain applications is immense. As technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning continue to advance, digital twins—and the smart supply chains they enable—will deliver unprecedented levels of visibility, control, and intelligent business automation.

By integrating AI more deeply with digital twins, businesses will gain the ability to better predict supply chain trends, identify potential disruptions, and manage inventory with greater accuracy, helping them prepare for unexpected events and optimize logistics in real time. Digital twins can also revolutionize fleet management by simulating and optimizing delivery routes dynamically based on traffic patterns, weather conditions, and vehicle performance, ultimately improving efficiency while reducing fuel consumption. Additionally, as predictive maintenance capabilities grow, digital twins will better anticipate equipment failures in the supply chain, allowing for proactive maintenance scheduling that minimizes downtime and prevents costly operational disruptions.

Energous: Powering the Future of Digital Twins

Digital twins have evolved from an experimental tool to a critical technology that transforms industries today. However, as their importance grows, so do the challenges associated with making them work. 

Schedule a demo with Energous today to learn how our wireless power technology can help energize your WPNs, enabling continuous data collection and expanding the capabilities of your digital twins.