Admin
Mechanical Engineer with 23 yrs of experience, specializing in Design Automation, CAD Customization, AR/VR Product Development, and Channel Enablement
Construction of a power plant
Operation stage is where the majority of the problems are highlighted due to not having done ergonomic analysis properly in early stage. The staff is usually ill-equipped or not trained properly which can cause huge problems in the operation stage.
The Challenge
- Handover stage – This is the stage where the plant’s working and maintenance is handed over to the operations department. It is a big challenge as they don’t know about the shortcomings that may appear in this stage, like clashes / interferences. So the handling of power plant for the staff can be a challenge. Also, teaching the operations staff can be ineffective due to no proper interactive training. Design data is not shared with the operations department.
- Late realisation of human errors – As told earlier, the errors in the 2D design of power plant are difficult to detect, so clash management (removing the existing clashes) at the operation stage is not economical.
- Inflation of costs – At this stage, the correction of errors leads to a much higher cost than in the earlier review stage. Cost efficiency is a priority for the stakeholders. So, they can’t afford to spend 90% more in the later stage for the same errors that would have cost less in clash prevention stage.
- Also, there are mistakes committed by the operation staff which turn out to be very expensive for the company.
- Serviceability assessment front loading
The Solution
Digital transformation is the way to go to avoid the high costs of mistakes that could be corrected in the beginning of the design stage itself. CAD is an effective medium to improve the design quality by making it 3D.
Prevention is better than cure, so the designs can be seen in 3D and interferences are prevented using CAD. This leads to less costs as compared to the 2D design based clash prevention.
Operations staff can be taught better using 3D designs. There is also a lot of clarity in 3D designs to identify mistakes of the designers at an earlier stage.
Exxar – CAD to VR Transformation is the best answer to all challenges
Our flagship product Exxar is a big plus that can be used for design review to improve the cost efficiency. It can be used along with the existing 3D CAD software that you have. It provides an immersive, virtual reality environment where the product can be viewed in 1:1 scale (unlike CAD software that shows the model in 20:1 scale). The model is loaded in the Exxar VR environment in less than a minute. Also, any changes made by the stakeholders in CAD software will be instantly visible in Exxar. One of its major advantages is that real time collaboration is possible so all stakeholders know what changes are needed. Operation staff training can now be done more effectively using the real-time collaboration feature.
Also, for the operation staff to communicate any error, there is an annotation feature in Exxar. And now the most important part, human centric designing can be done in a much better way as a person can enter in the virtual environment and try to correct the positions of various parts so that they can be handled by humans effectively in a a comfortable posture.
