Cadalyst - May 2008 - (Page 12)

techtrends By Kenneth Wong A Solid Job in AutoCAD Modeling a hyperbaric diving simulator. W hen Rob Burchett began his AutoCAD training, he never thought his drafting skills would land him at the bottom of a pit. But underneath a hyperbaric chamber in a dive simulator was precisely where he found himself when Técnico, a Chesapeake, Virginia–headquartered ﬁrm specializing in marine and industrial equipment repair and fabrication, hired him to create engineering drawings of the U.S. Navy’s Hyperbaric Diving Simulation Facility (DSF) in Panama City, Florida, in 2007. Armed with a caliper and tape measure and assistance from his colleagues, Burchett measured components then created a digital model of the entire DSF, from the outer geometry to the electrical parts and pipes within and even the knobs and dials on the control panels (figure 1). And he completed the project not in a parametric modeling system, as most people might have recommended. Instead, he produced it using AutoCAD 2008. From the Ground Up When Burchett, an associate at Técnico, told people he built the entire DSF setup “from a blank sheet,” he wasn’t exaggerating. He started without the usual source materials — no blueprints, no schematics, nothing. The DSF at the Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center (NDSTC) in Panama City consists of very few standard parts, so Burchett couldn’t even rely on the manufacturers’ catalogs to obtain the dimensions. Most were custom assemblies, like the compression chamber (known among the Navy staff as the Igloo) and the dive tank (nicknamed the Wet Pot by users), so he had to get up close and personal. “I went inside the chamber with my caliper and a notepad. I took measurements. Sometimes, I would get spare inventory parts, bring them back to my workstation, measure every nut and bolt on it, and build a solids model of it,” he recalled. In the beginning, Burchett routinely drove to the Naval Support Activity (NSA) center where the dive simulator is located, sketched the equipment layout, recorded the measurements, and then drove back to Técnico’s Panama City office. The destinations were close by — the two-mile trip across Highway 98 and Thomas Drive took only five minutes. “But they might as well be five hours away,” said Burchett. He felt the back-and-forth commute was such an impediment that he petitioned for an on-site workstation at the NSA office. After he was set up with a dual-core Pentium PC with 3 GB of RAM, the project began to make dramatic progress. If the dive simulator had been made up of complex surfaces, he might have used laser-equipped scanning devices 12 Figure 1. Rob Burchett from Técnico spearheaded the effort to document the U.S. Navy’s Hyperbaric Diving Simulation Facility. The project involved recording not just the outer geometry but also the internal components. to capture their shapes as point clouds. But that was not the case. “Most of the objects were just round chambers,” Burchett observed. So he simply used his drafting skills to reproduce them in AutoCAD. Edmond Delanoy, the officer in charge of the hyperbaric maintenance division and a retired diving warrant officer for the U.S. Navy, called Burchett a “Godsend.” He remarked, “The drawings Burchett completed played a crucial role in maximizing modern-day methods of recording vital [system] information in those same drawings, which is crucial to the lifecycle of the system.” Despite the challenges and the seven-month-long toil, Burchett believes the solids model was well worth the effort. “It was tremendously beneficial to all of us at Técnico for forming and fitting piping, tubing, and general design arrangement of hyperbaric components,” he noted. The Job and the Tool The Navy’s requirement — and consequently part of the reason Técnico was contracted for the job — was to have a complete set of engineering drawings: construction, weldwww.cadalyst.com cadalyst May 2008 http://www.cadalyst.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Cadalyst - May 2008

Cadalyst - May 2008 Contents Editor's Window Cad Central A Solid Job in AutoCAD Today’s Power — Quad-Core Workstations Performance — Tomorrow’s Possibilities Reverse Engineering an Antique Italian Treasure Trends in Reverse Engineering NextEngine 3D Scanner — Reverse-Engineering Tool Setting CAD Standards Fight for Your Hardware Rights The Jack and Jill of Ergonomics Technology for Civil Infrastructure Cad Cartoon Issue Indexes Shortcuts and Solutions

Cadalyst - May 2008

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