- Abstract
By introducing the specific applications of collaborative design for the underground facilities, the main control building, and the transformer fire protection system of Yulong Converter Station, and by comparing the advantages and disadvantages of conventional two-dimensional design methods and three-dimensional collaborative design methods, this paper illustrates the feasibility of applying three-dimensional collaborative design in converter station engineering and the benefits it brings.
- Application Background
The Jinping–Sunan ±800 kV UHVDC transmission project is one of the world’s highest-voltage direct current transmission projects, with a transmission distance of approximately 2,100 km. Its mission is to deliver hydropower from western China directly to the economically developed Sunan region in East China. Yulong Converter Station, located in Yulong Township, Xichang City, Sichuan Province, is the sending-end converter station of the Jinping–Sunan UHVDC transmission project and is currently the world’s largest-capacity converter station.
In order to verify the overall engineering application effect of three-dimensional collaborative design across all substation-related disciplines (primarily electrical and civil engineering), our institute used Yulong Converter Station as a pilot project to explore full-disciplinary three-dimensional collaborative design.
- Experience from Application
The main disciplines involved in substation design include electrical primary, electrical secondary, general layout, architecture, structural engineering, hydraulic engineering, and HVAC. Under the conventional two-dimensional working mode, the workflow is serial in nature and has the following disadvantages: each discipline can only begin work after receiving information from the upstream discipline, resulting in a longer design cycle; timely and effective communication among different disciplines is difficult, making coordination problems more likely and harder to detect; and there is no single source of truth for design information, so inconsistencies often arise between paper documents and electronic files.
Three-dimensional collaborative design is managed through the content management platform ProjectWise. It establishes a standardized hierarchical structure for project directory management, defines rules for naming and storing files and models, assigns permissions to all personnel involved in the same project, and enables design work to proceed according to a predefined workflow.
All project personnel work within one integrated model, supported by the same database, so that data can be entered once and reused multiple times. Each person has read and write access only to the part for which they are responsible, while having read-only access to the parts assigned to others. Designers can, at any time and from any location, reference other content into their own design sections as needed, enabling them to complete their work efficiently and intuitively. This greatly reduces the likelihood of conflicts between their own discipline and others, and further improves design quality. At the same time, because content from other disciplines can be conveniently introduced and viewed intuitively from multiple perspectives, communication efficiency is enhanced, which in turn improves design efficiency and provides a foundation for shortening the design schedule.
Collaborative design changes the conventional serial design mode into a parallel design mode, thereby shortening the overall project design cycle.
- Application Examples
The following sections take the parts of converter station design with relatively high requirements for coordination as examples to introduce the application process of multidisciplinary collaborative design and the improvements it offers over conventional design methods.
a. Collaborative Design of Underground Facilities
The underground facilities of a converter station mainly include structure foundations, electrical equipment foundations, cable trenches, road foundations, fence foundations, lightning shield wire tower foundations, domestic water supply networks, fire water supply networks, drainage networks, and so on. The location and dimensional information of these facilities is scattered across drawings from different disciplines and different volumes. When conventional design methods are used, designers must spend a great deal of time and effort collecting information on underground facilities, and it is difficult to ensure the accuracy of such information. As a result, clashes among underground facilities often occur during the construction stage, causing schedule delays. After adopting three-dimensional collaborative design, designers can conveniently reference the relevant underground facility models into the design model according to a predefined document structure. Because the referenced models and the design models of other designers are part of the same file system, the uniqueness and real-time accuracy of the input data are ensured. Once the referenced data is automatically updated, designers only need to use the software’s clash detection function to check and revise the original design model, and communicate the revisions to the construction site in a timely manner, thereby avoiding clashes.
The figure above shows the clash detection results for underground facilities in the DC yard area. The results indicate that a total of five hard clashes occurred between the drainage network, cable trenches, and equipment foundations in the DC yard. Designers checked the clashes one by one, made the necessary revisions, and promptly fed the revised results back to the site construction team before construction, thus avoiding on-site clashes.
b. Collaborative Design of the Main Control Building
In addition to the equipment installed in process rooms, the main control building contains many supporting auxiliary facilities, including water supply pipelines, drainage pipelines, air-conditioning ducts, indoor and outdoor air-conditioning units, valve cooling system pipelines, and smoke control and exhaust pipelines. Due to the constraints of the building’s floor area and volume, arranging these pipelines and auxiliary facilities requires designers to spend a large amount of time checking the dimensions of columns, beams, slabs, and related pipelines, as well as their spatial relationships. After adopting three-dimensional collaborative design, designers can quickly and efficiently reference the required models and information into the design model. Information that would otherwise require a great deal of time to collect under traditional design methods can be represented completely and accurately within a single model, thereby shortening the design cycle, optimizing pipeline routing, and reducing unnecessary allowances.
The figure above shows the multidisciplinary overall assembly model of the main control building. By using three-dimensional collaborative design methods, the original duct dimensions were optimized, reducing the floor height of the third floor from 5.1 m to 4.2 m and that of the fourth floor from 4.5 m to 4.0 m, thereby reducing investment costs.
c. Collaborative Design of the Transformer Fire Protection System
The transformer fire protection system mainly consists of water mist nozzles, fire protection pipelines and fittings, deluge valve assemblies, and related components. The main design challenges include maintaining safe live-clearance distances between the nozzles/fire pipelines and electrical equipment, ensuring that the water mist nozzle envelope fully covers the transformer body, and coordinating the spatial relationship between fire pipelines and underground foundations. Under traditional two-dimensional design methods, these challenges must be addressed mainly through the designer’s experience and spatial imagination, making precise positioning and layout impossible. After adopting three-dimensional collaborative design, the required information can be expressed intuitively and accurately in the model. Designers only need to adjust the positions of fire pipelines and nozzles according to the spatial relationships among the models, thereby optimizing the layout and reducing both the number of nozzles and the total pipeline length.
The figure above shows the transformer fire protection system model. The model visually displays the relationship between the water mist envelope of the nozzles and the transformer body, as well as the live-clearance distances between the nozzles/pipelines and the electrical equipment. By optimizing the nozzle spacing and spray angle, the number of nozzles was reduced from 55 in the original design to 51.
- Conclusion
China is a rapidly developing developing country, with hundreds of converter stations, substations, and series compensation stations of various voltage levels being commissioned every year.
Therefore, we hope that BENTLEY will place greater emphasis on this high-potential market and help us improve our design methods more rapidly, so that together we can make greater contributions to the field of substation design.
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