UNIFIED Theory (UTI) says that when designing and building a facility as complex as a large mineral processing plant, good communications between the designers and owner are essential.
The company says that its engineers are using a three-dimensional (3-D) modelling approach to improve the design speed and quality of plant facilities. This allows engineers to address the complexity and short design schedules for projects while integrating mechanical and structural systems.
Unified Theory claims that one of the many challenges for designers of facilities is the coordination of structural systems with the process equipment due to changes that occur during design development. Structures for mining facilities are a clear example of building types where the structural system conforms directly to the arrangement of process equipment. Due to accelerated design and construction schedules, engineers often begin structural design early in the project when the process layout is still conceptual and before the final equipment selection. This can lead to an inefficient design effort and costly changes during construction. Although the owner’s investment in the process machinery represents a substantial part of the capital cost, the structural systems must be integral to the equipment layout to achieve overall economy.
Often, the structural engineer must make critical decisions about materials, loading and framing while the capacities and product flows for the process are still undefined. Mineral processing plant designs usually do not allow designers enough flexibility to assume repetitive column bays and story heights such as in manufacturing plants or commercial buildings. The design team and owners start with a general idea of how the structure relates to the overall process, and the structural engineer often has to proceed with the design of specific structural members long before adequate shop drawings and equipment mounting details are available to complete the design.While engineers need to consider how equipment and structural members relate to each other in three dimensions, construction documents are typically drawn as two-dimensional floor plans and elevation views. This creates a challenge for the designers to provide enough information for decision makers to visualise the design at all stages of development.
Unified Theory says that this is why the use of 3-D modelling in the design process is best as it can facilitate efficient interaction among the various disciplines involved.
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