Smarter and faster software

A Norwegian company specialising in liquid handling systems and technology for the global oil & gas offshore and marine industries is among the early users of Autodesk’s new AutoCAD P&ID design software. Ing Per Gjerdrum has been using the software since May 2007 and is currently using it on one of its largest projects, designing a chemical injection package for the Norwegian continental shelf.

According to CAD designer Kai Helge Hovland, Ing Per Gjerdrum’s design team had previously been using the standard AutoCAD software to make piping and instrumentation diagram schematics. However, he said, since winning some larger projects, the team realised that “they needed an additional solution that allowed them to extract specific information.”

The chemical injection package has almost 2,000 unique tag numbers, so it was critical that the software could handle the project, said Hovland. It had to allow the designers to not only design piping schematics but to also extract the information they required, such as purchasing lists and project reports to ensure the project ran smoothly and to time.

“Using the AutoCAD P&ID software means that we can make the schematics and drawings faster than ever before,” Hovland explained. “Everything we need is included in the software. Being able to create reports means we can make purchasing lists so our suppliers can produce prices for the equipment we need much quicker. This enables us to deliver our quotations much earlier than we could before.”

According to Autodesk, a volatile commercial climate combined with ever-changing and increasingly complex regulations are driving plant design teams to constantly upgrade, redesign or just simply make small changes to the design of established plants.

The software company cites a typical scenario of a major plant modification that suddenly puts an operation in danger of violating regulatory reporting standards. Designers, therefore, need to revise drawings and instantly share breaking information with regulatory officials or other plant engineers. This is difficult if they have to comb through thousands of pieces of data to make sure that every pipe, nozzle, valve and pump in the diagram works together correctly.

The problem is particularly acute in the production of piping and instrumentation drawings or P&IDs, two-dimensional drawings created by the engineering companies to describe a plant and record how it operates, said Tim Gray, senior marketing manager of Autodesk’s plant design solutions unit.

“P&ID core documents by their very nature are complex, intricate and usually prolific in number,” said Gray. “They specify all the equipment, such as pipelines, valves, meters and connections, and therefore provide a map of how the plant works, is configured and an inventory of the things that go into the plant.”

While these modifications often become part of the day-to-day routine, they still entail checking and changing sometimes thousands of drawings and documents. Indeed, reports Autodesk, as much as 60-80% of the time is spent on revisions on some projects.

According to Autodesk, its new product is specifically made for the creation, modification and management of P&IDs. In particular, the product is designed to intelligently and dynamically link drawings to the design and the engineering information behind the drawing to safeguard accuracy and keep details up to date.

According to Gray, AutoCAD P&ID is the start of a new over the next few years. The product, he added, represents the software company’s official entry into the plant design market.

Autodesk has already attracted some customers for the product in the oil & gas sector as well as in biofuels applications. The pharmaceuticals industry is another promising market, with Pfizer UK among the early users, said Gray.

Features of Autodesk P&ID include Dynamic Lines and Dynamic Components, which are designed to simplify, automate and speed-up many of the detailed and repetitive tasks that engineers carry out, and make edit and revisions quick and easy.

Line lists and valve lists that were previously manually extracted can now be generated automatically - and as changes are made to the drawings, these are updated, enabling far more accurate and timely ordering.

As the new software product is part of the AutoCAD family and the data is linked to the drawing rather than being stored on a separate database, sharing designs with colleagues, clients and suppliers in native DWG format is straightforward and holds minimal risk of spoiling data, Autodesk claims.