The Port Botany expansion project, located in Sydney, is one of the largest port projects undertaken in Australia in the last 30 years. The port is predicted to double its current volume during the next 20 years.

BBS provided the design, supply and installation of the Botany Terminal B3A expansion for five additional fuel storage tanks for a variety of fuel products. Each of the five storage tanks was 24 m high with a capacity of 78,300 cubic metres.

Need for automation

BBS had used other piping design programs before and had to rely heavily on the experience of its piping drafters to drive it.

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“We lost a few of these experienced drafters in quick succession and were exposed to failure. We decided to acquire a few packages of CADWorx software and it saved us because it could be easily used by piping design engineers to fill in the gaps. This was not previously possible with the old software,” said Chief Piping and Layout Engineer Tony Fernandes.

CADWorx allowed BBS to successfully customise piping isometrics using Isogen, without the need for any manual input, eliminating checking. All the service information on the isometrics was extracted from the piping database.

CADWorx: improving project collaboration

The complexity and workload of the Botany project called for an improvement in project collaboration. CADWorx Equipment, CADWorx Steel and CADWorx Plant tools helped BBS to prepare collaborative plant modules. These software modules were most useful for BBS internal review between the various disciplines and the client.

“These modules were not only convenient to pass on information for civil and structural detail design but also to issue piping isometrics for shop fabrication and site installation, and to issue bill of material for procurement as required, such as field run piping,” said Mr Fernandes.

BBS was able to perform pipe support modelling and detailing, develop piping arrangement drawings from the model and an export piping model for stress analysis using CAESAR II.

Reducing costs by 60 per cent without loss of accuracy

Overall, CADWorx allowed BBS to reduce their piping engineering and drafting budget by 60 per cent without any loss in the accuracy of details.

Mr Fernandes said “Unlike other software, CADWorx helped us model all pipelines on a project in one drawing file or a few sub-files, reducing the number of x-refs. For the above project, piping isometrics were issued two months ahead of schedule and the project is well advanced for completion in September this year.”

Accurate spool and field checking

Cortex Engineering Software is COADE’s global partner responsible for distributing and supporting the CADWorx software.

Managing Director of Cortex Gary MacLeod said “The suite of CAD design packages is growing remarkably. Recently COADE announced the release of fieldPipe, a laser driven package that minimises field work associated with tie-ins and shop checking of piping spools. And just this month COADE announced a brand new package, PV Fabricator, that creates fabrication drawings for pressure vessels directly from calculations done in PV Elite, the pressure vessel analysis and design program.”

The CADWorx suite of programs helps to bring the cost savings of design automation, laser scanning and engineering design into the realm of small, medium and large scale engineering and fabrication companies.