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Cundall Codes Issue 1

Critical Systems By Jack Hyland-Knight, Senior Engineer, Mechanical Engineering – 20 December 2021

Construction site with diggers and a concrete part built structure

Authors

Jack Hyland-Knight standing in the interior of an office with a plant wall behind him

Jack Hyland-Knight

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Aisa wearing red top in Edinburgh office

Aisa Rozas

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Access chamber parametric design

Access chambers - from the surface they seem a simple hole in the ground but dig deeper and it becomes clear that is more to them than meets the eye. The design of access chambers must account for various elements such as pipes, ducts, loading, flotation and access for installation and maintenance. It is essential that they are correctly designed from the outset to avoid problems later in the project.

At Cundall, great strides have been made regarding digitalising our design processes for MEP, structural and specialist design services. This is expanding into civil engineering design, starting with a smart Revit family using parametric design tools to automate inspection chamber designs.

Parametric design allows the user to input any desired dimensions and penetrations without affecting the overall design of the chamber. This enables our engineers to be agile and update designs quickly when required. The images below show how specifying the dimensions and position of a duct penetration automatically adds it to the 3D geometry.

Parametric openings embedded within family for ease of coordination

Parametric openings embedded within family for ease of coordination shown in a CGI with text and an image of concrete block

Coordination with other design disciplines is improved thanks to the inclusion of visible access zones in Revit. This enables us to account for the underground services as they are seen above ground when the slabs and roads are modelled. All members of the design team can easily identify them, facilitating alignment across disciplines.

Access visibility for coordination

Access visibility for coordination CGI with photo of pipe work

Lastly, automatic scheduling enables the engineer to generate schedules derived directly from the Revit family. The schedules are created in a standard table format and include information necessary to specify the general arrangement of an access chamber (setting out, dimensions, wall thickness, cover slope, etc.)

Automatically generates schedules

Automatically generates schedules shown in block concrete and CGI diagram

Digital advances are enabling Cundall to produce higher quality designs more efficiently for our clients. We have been developing many of these tools which are being utilised across our projects, we will share more of them in future editions.

If you would like to get in touch about this or any other topics of digital engineering please contact csdigital@cundall.com

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