Drawing District Heating pipes in Civil 3D

[Tiger]

Hai Folks!

 

I have just accepted an assignment to do a project with district heating pipes in Civil 3D. As far as I understand (having only installed the program) there are no databases for district heating pipes (pre-isolated pipes for in-ground-use) in C3D right?

 

Are there catalogues for steel pipes availible? Downloadable?

 

Does anyone know if you can build your own pipe-catalogue? Is it user-friendly to do?

 

Does anyone here draw pipes with C3D? Does it work? Good/Bad? Easy to get the hang of?

 

Appreciate any help/feedback you folks can give me, this is not quite a rush-job but I don't have that many days to learn the program before I have to start producing.

[ReMark]

Pre-isolated or pre-insulated pipes?

[Organic]

Yes, you can build your own pipe catalogue.

 

I've only ever used it for water, stormwater & sewage pipes although you should be able to use it for a heating pipe and adjust the details accordingly.

 

It is pretty easy to use for drawing the layout and getting grades/levels, the customization of the long sections is a bit complicated. As an analysis program I don't really like it and the pipe analysis is done in other modelling programs generally.

[Tiger]

http://www.logstor.com/index.php?lang=EN - look at the images at the start, those kind of pipes, pre-insulated is what that company calls them.

 

Thanks for the input Dink. The 'long sections' you refer to I assume is the profile of the pipe? The lenght-wise view of the pipe perhaps I could put it. It doesn't sound good if you say its complicated, that is a big part of our projects to get the profiles out.

 

Analysis is not something we need the program to do, we have other programs for that anyway.

[Organic]

Thanks for the input Dink. The 'long sections' you refer to I assume is the profile of the pipe? The lenght-wise view of the pipe perhaps I could put it. It doesn't sound good if you say its complicated, that is a big part of our projects to get the profiles out.

 

Long section = short for longitudinal section, so yeah, the length-wise view of the pipe and the elevation of it as the pipe chainage increases, typically showing the natural surface, inverts, depth to pipe, hydraulic grade etc.

 

Producing a long section is not complicated, it is incredibly easy in fact. The harder part with Civil 3D is setting up all your styles (which control everything pretty much) and settings initially to get everything to display the way you want it too, although once it is done initially you rarely need to then change it.

[Tiger]

 

Producing a long section is not complicated, it is incredibly easy in fact. The harder part with Civil 3D is setting up all your styles (which control everything pretty much) and settings initially to get everything to display the way you want it too, although once it is done initially you rarely need to then change it.

 

aha, well that sounds better then. The follow question is, all these settings - can they be easily implemented on more than one computer? In this case it's just me and my C3D but if it turns out that this program is good for us, then we need to get 15 computers (and people) to do the same thing pretty much.