Opening Up New Horizons with 3DEXPERIENCE

Plants typically involve large and heavy equipment and their structures must often be built around this. This particularly applies to projects in the oil and gas, nuclear mining, hydroelectric and pharmaceutical industries. Plant structure and the coordination of construction with plant equipment is one of the most important considerations in plant design. Unlike generic CAD solutions, the Steel Structure Design solution from Dassault Systèmes (DS) has been developed in cooperation with leading EPCs. This ensures that applications follow professional practice and meet the requirements of EPCs and classification societies.

DS' Steel Structure Design solution provides intelligent templates that allow the designers to capture and re-use knowledge and design intent to greatly reduce the time required for design. The plant structure solution supports a smooth transition from general arrangement (the output of the project development phase) to the basic design or class design, where rules and strength calculation are required. FEM analysis can be carried out either by CATIA, SIMULIA, or through interoperability with commercially available solvers such as MSC-Nastran, ANSYS, or GTSTRUDL.

In Steel Structure Design solution, knowledge templates are provided to automate many difficult cases while maintaining all project specifications. As not all structural details are standard, this solution provides efficient interactive tools to create individual details that still carry the full spec-driven implementation. Copy and paste interactions allow for reusing of existing design components to rapidly complete the detailing. During the detailing stage, additional data is produced to represent the different stages of each part. These stages can include variables such as special plate profile or beam cutting. For non-traditional steel work, an interface to ALMA is provided where nesting and specialty plate steel cutting can be performed.

This solution also addresses the challenges for onshore plant development as well as offshore marine structures for FPSO (Floating Production Storage and Offloading) and oil drilling systems.