The CAD Insider

Righting the Wrong - the Costa Concordia Shipwreck

LONDON (Bentley Year in Infrastructure 2013), Oct 28, 2013 -  The cruise ship Costa Concordia, carrying twice the passengers of the the Titanic, did not have to worry about icebergs as it plied the waters of the Mediterranean in early 2012. It was a large rock that gashed the hull. It managed to get close to shore before it listed to one side and sank.  For a few months, it lay ignominiously on its side in the shallow waters off the coast of Giglio, an Italian island once known as a tourist destination. But now Giglio is famous worldwide for the biggest cruise ship wreck in history. With the captain having an illicit lover at the helm, then fleeing the scene, being rounded up to be charged for manslaughter (32 passengers perished), you couldn't get a juicier story. Also, a cruise ship capsized off shore is not good for tourist business. The whole thing was a national embarrassment. The ship had to go.

Image from Daily Mail, UK

Then conventional way to remove a ship is in parts. An army of workers swarm the ship, peeling off pieces like mad ants, hauling them off in a giant salvage operation. To do so would introduce all manner of pollutants into an area protected as a marine sanctuary. Why can't someone right the ship and sail it away?

It wasn't a new concept. Pulling a ship back upritght is known as parbuckling. But no one had had ever done this with a ship this size. This did not deter Tecon, an Italian firm specializing in offshore structures,  who not only was able to pull the Concordia upright, but proceeded to tell us about the effort at the Bentley conference. Bentley's SAC software was used to analyze the structure and the forces.

Tecon welded a structure to the side of the ship and attached cables to it. Supporting the ship on a somewhat stable bed especially made for for this operation that served as a pivot point, the cables were pulled until the ship was in the proper orientation. It took over 24 hours.

video from  Tecon site

As of the time of this writing, I'm not sure the gash has been repaired. The water still needs to be be pumped out to make it float again. The ship currently sits that way on a temporary platform. It will one day sail away as I presume it is now getting shipshape -- at least to the point at which it can limp to a suitable salvage site. 

Square Train In Round Tunnel - Sparks Fly in the Cascade Tunnel

LONDON (Bentley Year in Infrastructure 2013), Oct 28, 2013 -  Driving a train into a tunnel at full speed is an act of faith. As that little hole in the mountain approaches, you can only hope the engineers who designed the tunnel and the men who laid the tracks did their jobs well. Surely, all the other trains that have entered before yours have also emerged from the other side. Intact. Unscathed. Whole.

photo from Lewis and Clark Train Club

With the 8 mile long Cascade Tunnel, the longest tunnel in the United States, this is not necessarily the case. Built in 1928 before the advent of double stack container cars, corners of trains had been scraping the insides of the tunnel. The tunnel was notched to prevent this problem. It wasn't enough. The double stacked container cars were creating showers of sparks as they plowed their own, even deeper channels.

The obvious solution was to increase the depth of the notches. Makes sense, right? The tunnel owners (BSNF) balked at the $10 million cost to deepen the notch along the entire 8 mile length and hired JL Patterson & Associates, Inc. to suggest an alternative solution. Engineers at JLP lowered their gaze from the damaged roof of the tunnel to the track. Could the placement of the track, perhaps its shift over time, be causing the scraping? 

To prove their theory, JLP needed some serious technology. First, they would have to remap the tunnel. With the tunnel being under thousands of feet of rock, GPS wasn't going to help inside. They had to create a survey network throughout the tunnel length, anchored by GPS-verified locations on each end. Then they set to work constructing a 3D model of the rail and the tunnel.

A 3D laser scanner was driven through the tunnel and generated a point cloud model of the tunnel. The good news was the scanner generated 2.5 terabytes of data. That was also the bad news, jokes the JLP engineer who is presenting the project as finalist at Bentley's annual parade of top projects. Point clouds need to be converted to surface models in order to make themselves useful -- visually or for analysis. And also, the traveling scanner would need to be aware of its own position. Knowing its position and relating that to the dimensions of a double stacked container car should allow them to define a clearance between train and tunnel-- or lack thereof.

Who can help with that? Enter Bentley Systems. Bentley's Rail and Transit software seems tailor made for such an application. 

Bentley has software specifically for railroad design. From another Bentley project.

Bottom Line

JLP credits Bentley Rail and Track to help have saved BSNF save $9M of the projected $10M cost estimated for the original plan, a whopping 90% cost reduction. 

 

Crystal Sustainability Exhibit in London

LONDON (Bentley Year in Infrastructure 2013), Oct 28, 2013 - After a round of press announcements and industry updates, the media, Bentley employees and customers, were loaded onto double decker buses to visit the Crystal, a Siemens' funded futuristic building near the Thames River. The Crystal is billed as the world's largest exhibit devoted to urban sustainability. Siemens is betting that, despite its technological bent, it will become a tourist atttaction. 

Sustainable buildings on display at London's Crystal, which is bills itself as the world's largest urban sustainability exhibit.

I wasn't sure of the connection between Bentley and Siemens. Most CAD insiders know of Siemens PLM as a CAD company. There had been talk of Siemens (the parent company) being a Bentley customer on some building project.

The exhibits and videos were about technology as an answer to the world's social problems, such as over population and increasing urbanization. By 2050, 70% of the world's population will be in cities.  A third of them could end up in slums. 

The Crystal seems to offer technology as an answer. We can make more sustainable cars, cleaner energy. Siemens and Bentley can both help make greener buildings with their technologies. I guess with each car, building, power plant and city using less energy and material, we can make our dwindling resources last longer.

Social solutions such as population control and curbing demand for energy and materials are not addressed.

3D CAD Needs the Leap Motion Controller

SAN FRANCISCO (Autodesk Design Night), Oct 3, 2013 - The best 3D interface to CAD product is one that is not yet created.  Imagine, if you would, waving your hands in front of you to control an assembly, zooming in and out, moving part in and out, etc. without reaching for your mouse or using the keyboard.

Half the size of a deck of cards, the Leap Motion Conroller is able to detect precise finger and hand movement.

Enter the Leap Motion Controller. A box half the size of  deck of cards sits unobtrusively on the table and it is programmed to detect hands and fingers and their motion. Incredibly precise (the literature claims it has an accuracy of 1/100 of a millimeter!), it makes the Kinect box (the current choice in popular 3D scanning) seem like old news. 

I used the Leap Motion Controller during an Autodesk Design Night to lift plates off a human skull. I didn't have to hold a stylus (as with the zSpace device or the Leonar3Do "bird." I could have been holding a scalpel, though. Leap people tell me it can detect instruments I am holding. This might be too good for CAD users. It could save lives. A $79 box, the proper interface, a robotic arm and a brain surgeon in the Mayo Clinic could operate on...well, anyone and anywhere. 

While medical applications and CAD seem like the obvious missed market opportunities, the Leap Motion guys seems to be going for the other end of the spectrum with  aiming for the mass market, proud of selling in Best Buy, games and simple drawing and paint programs.

I ask about Autodesk applications using it and the only one so far is Maya. Inventor, Revit, Civil3D would so benefit from such a natural 3D interface but I don't get the impression that anything is in the works.

I guess there's more money with popular applications, even though it is a buck or two at time.