Elaboration of the drawings of hydroelectric station powerhouses by the three-dimensional modeling technique

Abstract

Automating the design of hydropower and water-management facilities is one of the scientific lines of activity of the Department of Renewable Energy Sources and Hydropower Engineering of the St. Petersburg State Technical University (SbGTU). Works in this field have been being carried out for 30 years. At present problems of automating computational design procedures have been solved. Numerical methods and algorithms have been developed and program libraries have been created [3, 4]. The general concept of computer-aided design of hydropower facilities (CAD HPF) has been formulated [1, 2]. Next in turn is the integration of mathematical support and software produced and checked in design practice into unified design production lines (DPLs) of hydropower structures and equipment. The software of the integrated CAD HPF can be represented in the form of five subsystems (Fig. 1).Computational Design Procedures Automation Subsystem. It, as all other subsystems, includes general and applied software (SW). The latter is developed, as a rule, at design and research organizations solving power-engineering problems. These are software packages and program systems for making engineering-technical calculations (ETCs) and technical-economic calculations (TECs), mathematical models of the facilities, equipment, and processes, as well as the programs realizing the design decision-making algorithms. This subsystem includes also the database management system of the general database.Drawing-Graphic Design Procedures Automation Subsystem. Included here are the basic SW of the graphics kernel, its extension, and object applications of the graphics system developed specially for the CAD HPF. Also here is the graphics database containing drawings and geometric models of unified structural members and standard, batch-produced equipment of facilities designed earlier and the results of current designing as well as images of facilities and equipment stored in raster formats.Design Production Lines. This is a special group of programs, the results of the operation of which are the finished design document (financial estimates, schedule, drawings of the hydroelectric station powerhouse, explanatory list, etc.). The DPL ties the programs of all aforementioned subsystems needed for creating the design document into a unified sequence and organizes a dialog with the designer, activating his participation at certain design stages.Design Documents Issuance Subsystem. This is a set of programs for final editing of text and graphic design documents and their transfer to an external medium. The subsystem should operate both with vector and raster images and should convert the images from one format to the other.Graphical User Interface. This is a program system for controlling the CAD HPF and carrying on a dialog with users in simple object-oriented languages.It can be considered that the degree of integration of CAD is determined by the relationship of the volumes of information being transmitted over channels 2 and 1. Thus, the graphics system ...