Tecnoinox is an Italian manufacturing excellence that has been designing and manufacturing modular kitchens, salamanders, and combination ovens for professionals in the catering and hospitality industry since 1984.

In line with companies that develop custom-made and tailor-made products, Tecnoinox considers product development to be a strategic activity. This is why the company has invested in R&D, integrating cutting-edge technological solutions with the aim of increasing its competitiveness, improving product quality, and reducing development costs and times.

Thanks to the technologies implemented, Tecnoinox is now also able to meet customer requirements during the redesign and modification of the kitchen in the design phase. The starting point for the product development digitization process on which the innovation of the design department is based is digital twin technology, understood as the virtualization of product models. The aim is to optimize UX (user experience) analysis on new products and enable the collection of feedback (both engineering and aesthetic/functional) during the design phase, in order to manage project variables more efficiently and avoid the costly construction of non-performing prototypes.

PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) system required for the integration of projects, CAD models, and all information necessary to manage the entire product lifecycle

CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) for virtualization of technical drawings

Digital twin of individual kitchen components

The proposed approach focused on applying a digital twin of a deep fryer, identifying two stages of development:

Identification and introduction of prerequisites for enabling digital twins (digitization of technical designs, availability of an accurate 3D CAD solution, simulation of test processes, etc.)

Virtualization of the fryer model itself in virtual reality.

The implementation of PLM allows all data necessary for the company to design and manage new product requests (new kitchens requested by restaurants) and related orders to be managed digitally on a single platform.

The virtualization of new kitchens using Virtual Reality inside the CAVE (a technology that projects a digital twin of the product onto four screens) allows for immersive visualization and a realistic experience of using the kitchen. This makes it possible to gather technical, functional, and aesthetic feedback by interacting directly with the virtual prototype, without having to build a physical one.

The creation of a digital twin of the fryer in a virtual kitchen allows engineers in the technical department and users (chefs) to replicate an application scenario in a virtual environment, enabling them to analyze the ergonomic impact of the entire kitchen’s components.