Innovative live digital twin for hydraulic structures

Maintaining hydraulic structures such as dams, penstocks, or water lock gates in operating conditions and optimizing their maintenance costs are key issues for energy production or river navigation. The ultimate objective is to know the real state of fatigue and damage of the structure and identify any related anomalies. The authors introduce a digital twin for fatigue evaluation, merging real data obtained with an embedded sensor network and a numerical model that converts in real time measured data into estimation of thefatigue. The concept has been used on the Avignon water lock gate on the Rhône for fatigue estimation; other applications are also described here.