Digital Twins for Direct Air Capture — How TU Vienna Built a Live Research Platform with cts DataFabric

In this episode, Clemens talks with Stefan Jankovic, postdoctoral researcher at TU Wien, about a 2.5-year collaboration that produced a fully operational digital twin for a direct air capture pilot plant. Stefan explains how his research group combines experimental work, measurement technology, and process simulation to better understand and optimize carbon capture — and why centralized data management turned out to be the critical foundation for everything else. The conversation covers how the team previously built a digital twin on Microsoft Azure, what worked and what didn't, and why a colleague's recommendation of inmation changed their approach entirely. Stefan walks through the concrete architecture: multiple vendor PLCs, external measurement devices with different protocols (OPC UA, MQTT, Modbus), and how DataFabric serves as the single point of truth that makes dashboards, automated reporting, and simulation model integration possible without custom programming overhead. The episode also looks ahead: real-time optimization based on environmental and electricity market conditions, the vision of shipping a DataFabric Core with every containerized DAC unit as a Digital Twin as a Service, and Stefan's upcoming course at TU Wien where chemical engineering students will get hands-on experience building digital twins with industry software.