FEATURE ELECTRICAL EQUIPMENT
DIGITAL TWIN IMPROVES DESIGN PERFORMANCE
Electric utilities are leveraging digital twins to manage substations over their lifecycles and are empowering multidiscipline teams to collaborate with other stakeholders. As a result, they are gaining accuracy in their modelling, streamlining design and construction, and increasing safety and reliability. To illustrate, here is how China-based Powerchina Hubei Electric Engineering and Southeast Asia-based Pestech are going digital in their substation design with applications from Bentley
P
owerchina Hubei was the lead designer on the Miluo Western
220kV substation project, which began operating in May. The substation will significantly improve the grid structure in the state of Miluo and enhance the reliability of power supplied to 150,000 residents. Powerchina Hubei adopted digital twins on this project to improve construction coordination and were able to deliver it 30 days ahead of schedule, saving CNY1.5m. The landscape surrounding this site is
complex, with large residential houses that affect the layout of the substation facility. The compressed area meant that the spatial location of each asset type – underground works, the building structure and facilities, hydraulic pipeline networks, cable trench, and ground grid – required close collaboration among the contributing disciplines. With only ten months to complete construction, the team had to also closely coordinate with each participating construction organisation to complete the project safely and on time. To plan the project, Powerchina Hubei
used ContextCapture to create the digital context. The inclusion of landscape, vegetation, rivers and lakes, roads, and houses surrounding the project location helped to support substation site planning and selection, as well as corridor planning. Moreover, the team optimised design and collaboration using Bentley Substation and
40 FEBRUARY 2020 | ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING
OpenBuildings to address the challenges of the compact urban location. Powerchina Hubei used Synchro for 4D
construction sequencing and to organise and share construction information, visualise and track progress, and manage change. At completion, the team provided 3D models to the owner to build virtual reality scenes to enhance operations and maintenance. Powerchina Hubei completed the project within nine months - one month ahead of schedule. “The pilot program implemented
standards during construction that helped to improve design quality,” said Wei Wang, executive assistant, senior engineering, Powerchina Hubei Electric Engineering. “The program set a great example for using digital twins to support future state grid projects.” Pestech, an integrated Malaysian
electric utility providing power transmission infrastructure and assets, power generation, rail electrification, and power products and embedded system software, used digital twins for the design and delivery of a 275/33kV gas insulated switchgear substation at Sibiyu Sarawak. The project, expected to be complete in January 2021, consists of supplying, erecting, and commissioning two 120MVA 132/33kV transformer bays, four 132kV overhead line bays, one bus coupler bay, and a 33kV switchgear with ancillary equipment. Using Bentley’s open modelling
applications enabled the team to increase
The collision detection on the underground facilities found 30 collisions across different disciplines, which helped the team to adjust designs quickly. Image courtesy of Powerchina Hubei Electric Engineering
The Substation API Builder is also in development, where all substation models and schematics can be instantly generated within minutes, which is a boost for the engineering and project team to expedite design drawings and documents, providing further reduction time
productivity significantly and to keep pace with refurbishment and expansion. The multidiscipline team used Bentley Substation and Promis.e to support primary and secondary design and Bentley Raceway and Cable Management to design the cable ladders, trays, underground trenches, and cabling routes. The team also used OpenBuildings Designer for the control building design, which was then referenced in the substation model. Pestech leveraged digital twins to deliver
its integrated switchgear substation design 50 per cent faster, saving RM 175,000 on the project, primarily from reduced labour costs. Automated construction deliverables produced directly from the intelligent substation model reduced the time and cost of producing and updating construction drawings, bills of material, wire list reports, wire label reports, and cost estimates. “Bentley Substation offers an
unmatched, streamlined, intelligent modelling approach to substation design,” said Afiq Rosli, design engineer with Pestech. “Unlike CAD-centric designs, Bentley Substation’s intelligent modelling maximises design automation to dramatically reduce manual drafting, errors, and rework. The result is the ability to produce design drawings up to 50 per cent faster.”
Bentley Systems
bentley.com
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