The United Engine Corporation (UEC), which is part of Rostec (Russia’s State Corporation for Assistance to Development), and Zyfra (a Finnish-Russian industrial digitalisation company) have begun testing the Zyfra Industrial Internet of Things Platform (ZIIoT).

This system, which includes elements of artificial intelligence (AI), will monitor the manufacture of engines and make it possible to simulate testing in a virtual environment, significantly reducing the number of real tests, while increasing the quality of the final product and speeding up the production process.

The pilot project, which is being implemented at the Salyut production unit for the Ai-222-25 turbo-jet engine used in the Yak-130 combat-capable trainer, includes automated data entry, central information storage and an AI module.
A database with key information based on previous tests is used to ‘train’ the artificial intelligence. The system determines how specific characteristics affect the quality of the engine and builds a mathematical model of the tests.

Information about the new components for the engine and conditions for assembling them is uploaded into this model, and a ‘digital twin’ of the end product is produced. AI then analyses the data and predicts how successful real tests would be on an engine made using these components under specified conditions.

Pavel Prieditis, Zyfra’s strategic-clients director, said: “The digital platform is the only effective production tool that lets you save significantly on a company’s resources. As new technologies are introduced, the need for supporting disjointed systems — primarily manual data-entry and corrections — is removed, and unified directories and data wizards are created.”