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PiVDC Tools made Water Treatment Plant Expansion easier
Location:Pflugerville, Texas
Area:96,740 sq ft
LOD:
Team Size:
Software Used:Revit, Navisworks Manage
Trades Covered: 3D Modeling, MEP Engineering, MEP Design
The project included renovating and expanding the water treatment plant in Pflugerville, Texas. Spanning an area of 96,740 sq ft., the project aimed to expand the plant’s capacity to meet the increasing water demands in the city.
Pinnacle was entrusted with creating 3D models in ACS and MEP trades, which was made efficient and more productive with the help of PiVDC task-specific plugins.
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Comprehensive & Coordinated Service Drawings for complete coordination among all trades
Element selection and specific filtration
Coordination
Quality checking
Code Compliance
Annotation
Challenge 1: Selecting specific elements
Project specification changes and coordination needs led to modifying the parameters and geometry of thousands of elements. Creating manual schedules and filters to identify the particular elements requiring changes was time-consuming.
Solution: Pi Quick Filter, Select Element by ID
Used a total of 942 times, processing 92,607 elements, Pi Quick filter and Select Element by ID tools helped the project team automate the process and filter out the required elements 2x faster.
Challenge 2: Ensuring the accuracy and compliance of Bend angles
The project had precise instructions for conduit bend angles. Making sure that all the bends followed the given instructions was a tedious task as the project contained thousands of conduit runs.
Solution: Standard Bend Angles, Validate Bend angle
These tools automated the process of validating the bend angles. They helped the team identify all the elements that did not meet project bend requirements in a few clicks. There were 102 hits on these tools, and they processed 3,039 elements.
Challenge 3: Accurate conduit drawing
Drawing conduits and establishing connections in the model with hundreds of fixtures and parallel conduit routings proved challenging and time-consuming. The complexity increased when adjustments were needed for conduits running in parallel, demanding meticulous attention to size, gapping, and elevation.
Solution: Parallel routing, conduit by wire
The Parallel Routing tool helped engineers automatically draw conduits of specified sizes, maintaining space, elevation, and continuity with previously drawn routes, while the Conduit by Wire tool efficiently drew conduits using wire endpoints, following the configured routes.
Challenge 4: Element alignment, offsetting, and coordination
It was an industrial project involving numerous pipes and conduits with elevation and run direction changes. Establishing connections between these elements required multiple section views. However, switching views during the connection process caused graphic regeneration and added complexity in coordination as multiple viewpoints for the same clashes were generated in Navisworks.
Solution: Smart Bends, Alignment, Offset, and Joining tools
PiVDC plugins, used 864 times, processing 2,577 elements, helped the project team automatically align, connect, and offset sets of conduits and pipes, maintaining elevation and direction. Smart Bends helped in efficient coordination by allowing quick adjustments in connection offsets, heights, and angles, while the Clash Optimizer tool helped group similar clashes, making it easier to identify the clashes in Navisworks.
Challenge 5: Annotating thousands of elements in the model
Providing dimensions to parallel pipes and conduits, aesthetic adjustments of dimensions, text notes, or tags were time-intensive and led to system lags.
Additionally, manually gathering and updating the coordinates of columns and beams was cumbersome.
Solution: Adjust DIM Text, General Dims, Sequencing Tags, Spot Coordinate, Text Aligner
PiVDC tools accelerated these tasks by automating alignment checks, text adjustment, aesthetic arrangement of text notes and tags, and extracting spot coordinates for MEP and ACS elements. They were run 312 times, processing 1,962 elements.
Challenge 6: Managing Files and Revit content
Pinpointing the exact file locally or on the server proved challenging as multiple linked files were used in the host files. Moreover, managing numerous families created as per the submittal was difficult, especially when integrating them into the file directly from the folder.
Solution: Family Browser, Local Folder
The Local Folder tool helped find locally stored Revit files by opening the exact location in a click or two. Meanwhile, the Family Browser tool provided an advanced view for easy searching, grouping, and managing families. These tools were used 312 times, processing 894 elements.
The project team utilized 44 PiVDC plugins a whopping 3,265 times, processing a total of 112,830 elements. These tools saved around 79 hours, amounting to 12.6% of the total modeling time. The plugins not only boosted efficiency and accuracy but also ensured the project’s quality and timely completion.
VP, Product Design
This was my 2nd project with Pinnacle and I have been satisfied with Pinnacle’s problem-solving approach and quick turn-around. The project at this time was a bit unique and challenging, but the positive attitude by Pinnacle team mitigated.