BIM is present and future in the management of the life cycle of a building, in our case industrial. If my facilities are old, or if despite being modern they have not been designed with this methodology, does that mean that I can no longer opt for the advantages of BIM? The answer is no, and for that what I need is to resort to reverse engineering.
In a normal engineering process, a new facility is designed, modeled, and built from there. With reverse engineering we start from something that already exists, and what we want is to obtain its modeling.
Surely any existing installation has design plans and even AS BUILT plans, but how accurate are these plans? Do I have a true three-dimensional model that includes both civil works and facilities? Have variations that have they been running after the installation started up? It is very common, when carrying out reform and improvement projects, to try to place something in a certain location, and what the plan said that it entered without problems turns out that it does not do so because, for example, there is no perpendicularity between enclosures that theoretically there was or because at a certain point an installation rack does not go parallel to the ground and hangs more than previously thought.
The starting point to overcome this problem is the scanning of the installation, using a 3D laser scanning equipment . With this equipment, we are able to configure a point cloud, which is created from making hundreds of thousands of distance measurements per second from the position of the equipment to its surroundings, which allows me to obtain a rough representation of the installation . This work is complemented by a photographic sweep that already gives me a very accurate representation of the installation.
It remains to give meaning to those points; that is, converting groups of points into physical elements . This process is called digitization and it is already carried out in the technical office with powerful information processing tools, which allow these points to be converted into walls, pillars, beams or pipes, etc., with millimeter accuracy that allows me to ensure that this is true. my installation.
From there, I can start to consider taking advantage of my model by adding information, identifying the different equipment and elements and providing them with meaningful data from, for example, the maintenance point of view in order to move towards BIM 7D .
Another possible use is to have a foundation for the generation of the company’s digital twin . If we combine the true image of the plant with other artificial intelligence tools, we will be able to analyze what changes would mean in my process without actually having to implement them, being able to model situations and find solutions that satisfy my present and future needs at a minimum cost.
At INGESER we have 3D laser scanning equipment, digitization tools and highly qualified personnel both for the development of information capture field tasks and for subsequent technical office.
