Virtual design and construction is gaining ground in the utilities markets because of its ability to speed large-scale planning and development of energy projects. Though current applications on projects have just begun to touch the full potential of the approach, experienced users are enthusiastic about the financial benefits of debugging a project by building it first on the computer.
Minneapolis-based Mortenson Construction Corp. is saving money by using virtual design and construction (VDC) on energy projects, says Mark Ruffino, vice president of the firm’s renewable-energy group. Mortenson uses building information models (BIM) to overcome terrain constraints on wind-energy sites and to plan laydown and erection of turbines. “We can fine-tune what we disturb,” he says.
摩顿森模型涡轮选址找到缩放效果ts and develop rigging protocols “so teams have an efficient plan,” says Ruffino. He notes that the nacels, or generating cores, are larger than school buses. “We have to figure where to set them up,” he says.
The cost savings can be significant. On a difficult wind-energy project in West Virginia completed last year, planners used VDC tools to layer environmental data, avoid artifacts from logging operations and steer around the most difficult terrain. “It was a huge benefit,” Ruffino says.
Charles Hixon, business development manager at A/E/C Bergmann Associates, Rochester, N.Y., thinks VDC will continue to evolve. A founding member of the Transportation Research Board’s visualization committee, he says current VDC integration has not reached its potential. He sees business opportunities for new approaches in project management and vendor support.
Traditional CAD software developers, which have saturated that market, are big drivers behind BIM, Hixon says. But it could be a win-win situation, for designers and vendors, if the BIM tool enables teams to produce better designs, he adds.
宾夕法尼亚州Exton的Bentley Systems Inc.的Bentley变电站V8i的一种新的VDC工具是宾夕法尼亚州Bentley Systems Inc.的Bentley Vertination V8i。该公司预计，融合了智能网格技术的广泛系统升级以及全球系统增长的广泛系统升级市场不断增长。V8I产品经理Mike Lambert表示，该工具为设计，构建和操作建立了与企业范围内的工程内容管理系统集成的智能信息模型。用户可以在2D电气原理图，3D Isometrics或可导航模型中工作，并自动生成材料清单。
Hixon says current limits of VDC tools force project managers to consult different specialists for different pieces of the project to get the required information, rather than see all the data at once.
“It is not integrated very well….We need to allow project managers to see every part of that data simultaneously,” he says, adding, “3D design itself is effective, very powerful, but we want to link it to other data....Think Google Earth.”
