Experimental verification of a physics-based digital twin of a towed cable-body system

• Digital twin of dynamic cables is experimentally verified. • System is tested at the laboratory scale under several conditions. • The system allows for accurate towbody motion estimation. • Low-tension events are corrected via the digital twin without force sensors. To mitigate the effects of dynamic tension on marine towed cable-body systems, a previously proposed Digital Twin of the cable is implemented and evaluated in this paper. The Digital Twin uses available sensor data and simulates the cable dynamics in parallel with the physical system, outputting a real-time estimate of the cable tension and towbody motion. The Digital Twin model and implementation are first summarized. Then an experimental study is performed to demonstrate and verify the ability of the Digital Twin to estimate the tension in a small-scale cable-body system. The experiment consists of cable-winch system mounted on an actuated platform over a water channel. The system is instrumented to measure the cable tension and towbody position. The Digital Twin, which takes only the platform position as an input, is shown to reliably run in real-time for a range of input motions and predict the cable tension and towbody motion with reasonable accuracy.