Plant 3D equipment is usually treated as the easy part. It is the big, obvious stuff, the pumps, tanks, vessels, exchangers and columns that appear as symbols on your P&IDs. People drop it in, size it roughly, and move on to the piping, which feels like the real work. It is not the easy part. […]
Plant 3D equipment is usually treated as the easy part. It is the big, obvious stuff, the pumps, tanks, vessels, exchangers and columns that appear as symbols on your P&IDs. People drop it in, size it roughly, and move on to the piping, which feels like the real work.
It is not the easy part. It is the part everything else depends on.
Equipment sits at the top of the model. Every line connects back to a piece of it, so a piece of Plant 3D equipment is not a shape you pipe around, it is the anchor the whole model hangs off. Get it wrong and everything attached to it is wrong too.
The detail that matters most is the nozzles, the points where your piping connects. Their position, orientation, size and rating decide whether a line lands where it should on the real plant. A nozzle a few hundred millimetres out, or facing the wrong way, is not a small error. Every line off it carries the same mistake.
Approximate equipment surfaces late and expensive. You design a tie in to a nozzle that is not where the model says it is, and the spool does not fit on site. You pipe to a vessel from an old datasheet, when the real one was modified years ago. Fabrication gets built wrong and found on site, where the fix costs many times more than getting it right would have.
If you own the site, that is a model you cannot fully trust and an asset record with holes in it. If you engineer the site, you are the one who piped to the wrong nozzle, and the one redoing it.
How you build a piece of Plant 3D equipment depends on whether the site is greenfield or brownfield.
On a greenfield site you are placing new kit, so you build it from nothing. Autodesk Plant 3D has a Create Equipment function that starts from a template and sizes the block through a dimensions table, parametrically, so you shape it with numerical fields rather than drawing it freehand. For real mechanical detail, import a model straight from Autodesk Inventor, Autodesk’s mechanical design software, which drops in cleanly because it is also Autodesk, or from another package such as SolidWorks. One tip: the builder is basic, so where you can, download the manufacturer’s own model, a pump for instance, which most suppliers now provide, and convert it inside Plant 3D. It is far more accurate than rebuilding from a datasheet.
On a brownfield site the equipment already exists, and here it pays to remember that a design model and the as built plant are not the same thing. A site may have been built from design models and isometrics, but that does not mean it was built exactly to them. Things change during construction. Kit gets substituted, nozzles get repositioned, runs get rerouted around whatever was actually in the way. So the old design model records the intent, not the plant. The only reliable source is the plant itself. We model the equipment from the point cloud captured by laser scanning and convert it into a Plant 3D block, so it matches the plant as it stands today, nozzles and all.
Either way, imported Plant 3D equipment needs its nozzles set, each given a nominal bore and pressure class, before you pipe from it. And as you build, you attach the tags, descriptions, materials, design pressure and standards, so the equipment carries the data your reports and asset records draw on later. We cover those reports later in the series.
This is our work. For existing sites we capture your plant by laser scan and build Plant 3D equipment that matches it exactly, nozzles included. For new kit we bring in supplier or Inventor models and set every nozzle with the right bore and rating, so your piping connects cleanly. And we attach the materials, design data and standards your asset records and compliance need, so the equipment is the right shape carrying the right information.
If your current model is a set of generic blocks that do not match the plant, that is the foundation everything else stands on. It is worth getting right.
Next in this series: The Breakdown of Plant 3D Piping and Fittings.
