Siemens saves 25 % time reduction with Plant-4D

Siemens Demag Delaval is a world class supplier of centrifugal compressors, steam turbines and auxiliary systems. The company is a full subsidiary of the Siemens organisation. Their specialisation is within the oil & gas market, focusing on added value to their customers.
Since 1999, Siemens Demag Delaval uses Plant-4D of CEA Systems for designing the lube oil- and seal gas systems. Since a short while, also the tubing in the seal gas systems are fully designed into the 3D-model. This speeds up the work on the shop floor, says Klaas Agelink. He is teamleader of Systems Drafting and closely involved in the use of Plant-4D.
He tells us that previously the mechanic decided how to route the tubing on the baseplate. Due to the increased use of tubing and tube fittings it was required to design them in advance in Plant-4D. Thus the assembly is now more efficient and quicker, and the optimum line run is routed in an earlier stage. By means of Plant-4D, the designer has the complete overview over the system. This reduces rework and fits perfectly in Siemens Demag Delavalâ??s continuous Quality Improvement Process.

Siemens Demag Delaval now has an extensive library of tube and tube fitting components available. The designer places the lines in their 3D model and Plant-4D ensures that the 2D views and isometric drawings are produced consistently, correctly and fully automatically.
Also the fully integrated Bill of Materials exactly specifies the amount and details of all required components on the projects.

Klaas Agelink: â??We design our complete system only once, in Plant-4D. Subsequently Plant-4D ensures that we do not perform any activity too much. In total we reach by means of Plant-4D a time-reduction of 25% with respect to our previous system."

The Company

Siemens Demag Delaval Turbomachinery B.V. situated in Hengelo (the Netherlands) serves a wide circle of clients in market segments such as oil and gas production, gas transport and storage, refineries and petrochemical plants. Most of the compressors and turbines are delivered as packages containing baseframe, driver (electric motor, gas turbine or steam turbine), gearbox, one or more compressors and a (separate or integrated) lube oil and seal gas system.

Plant-4D selection

In order to be able to design compact packages the Siemens Demag Delaval engineering department started designing the lube oil and seal gas auxiliary piping with 3D CAD using the Computervision Calma Dimension III CAD software. In 1998 a Y2K problem was foreseen with the existing software, so the decision was taken to adopt another plant design software package. An investigation was started with suppliers of plant design software. Four main suppliers were selected to do a representative benchmark. There was a list of demands and wishes. Significant time savings needed to be attained by the use of automatic oneline isometric drawing generation software. A solution using AutoCAD was preferred because it had already been used for a couple of years and a running start could be made. After careful consideration by key-users and technical information system support functions the decision was made to go ahead with the Plant-4D package from CEA.

The main arguments for selecting Plant-4D from CEA were:

• The integration of schematics such as P&ID's with the 3D piping environment
• The open database concept AutoCAD could still be used as the CAD engine.