SW and plant design 1

[RBasniak]

Hi everyone...

Actually, I'm working for PETROBRAS making all the equipment and piping from an Fluid Catalytic Cracking Unit of one of their oil refinery. This is my first job with plant design using solidworks. I would like to know if anyone here have been using SW for plant design and wanna share their experiences. I'm on it for more than six months, have almost all work done and I think it's time to discuss about with someone that is using sw for it for a time as well. Do you think it's a good option for plant design? What are the main assy size that you're using? What's the machine config? etc... My main assy have 4500 components, I'm working on a P4 2.4Ghz, Elsa Gloria II 128Mb, HD SCSI, 1Gb RAM. In my opinion, the sw's piping module is nice, but makes assys tooooooo hard to load, the concept he uses of making one pipe file for each piping assy is too bad in my opinion, if it was made diferent thing could be much better... it takes too many time to load, rebuild, save, rotate the model, everything get slow because it makes unnecessary part files in my opinion... what's the opinion of people who uses it for a long time??

Best Regards,
Rodrigo Basniak
Mechanical Designer
A1 Engenharia e Gerenciamento Ltda
Curitiba, PR
Brazil

 

[SBaugh]

Under the SW website -

http://www.solidworks.com/pages/services/SystemRequirements.html

- SW list the RAM specs see below.

RAM
• Small parts and assemblies (<1000 components and <300 feature) - minimum 256MB, 384MB or more recommended.

• Assemblies’ greater than 1000 components and parts greater than 300 features, 512MB or more recommended.

• Assemblies’ greater than 2500 components and parts greater than 1000 features, 1GB or more recommended.

With the 4500 Components you list, I would think you would want more RAM. I would go up to 2-3 Gigs of RAM.

Your Video Card has quite a bit of age to it. I would upgrade to one of the higher priced Quadro's - like the 1000, 2000, or 3000

If you have Hyperthreading turned on, try turning it off. That should give you some performance increase.

I did some plant designing in SW a few years ago. I never got finish the job, because the company decided to cut cost, so that meant me. I never used the piping in my Plant designs, I was building the steel for the building and automating it. It was going real well when i was working on it.

Regards,

Scott Baugh, CSWP

http://www.3dvisiontech.com

http://www.scottjbaugh.com

faq731-376

 

[macPT]

I have some experience with mini-hydric powerplants.

Not all the powerplant but mainly the machanical parts that I am involved with. Nevertheless I allways have to create concret parts and all to create the needed interfaces with machanical parts.

In an assembly have components 800 components and I can retrieve it it just a few seconds (P4 2,6GHz, hyperthreading,memory 1GB, wildcat VP560,UATA disk). It works smoothly.

This assembly maybe is not good for speed testing, but is interesting as it as small parts (like M16 washers) and big parts (the concrete part as 30m width and 9m height), different materials (including a 9ton steel structure).

I didn't notice any problem for SW to deal with such a large (refering to the dimensions) assembly toghether with small parts or to deal with big numbers in mass properties.

Regards