Editor's Pick: Scanner Solutions Streamline Plant Upgrade and Revamp Projects

By DE Editors

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

Photorealistic scans help you visualize and navigate an industrial plant from your web browser, but they're generally just dumb pictures because the time and money required to convert laser scan data into something intelligent are astronomical. AVEVA Solutions, a provider of engineering IT software for the plant, power, and marine industries, recently unveiled a couple of laser-scanning processing tools that could change all that by enabling you to produce intelligent 3D models of an industrial site cost- and time-effectively.

The first is called AVEVA IntelliLaser. Now, what this does is enable industrial process plant operators to add intelligence to dumb photorealistic laser-scan data with minimal manual work. IntelliLaser automatically creates associations between objects within the laser scan and asset tag information by creating intelligent "hot spots" that link piping and equipment to their associated plant information. This smart data is then available to users through a web browser, meaning that you can visualize and navigate a plant knowing how items within the scan relate to existing plant information.

Next there's AVEVA Laser Modeller – the double el there reflecting the company's British roots. With this software, you can position a plant model within an accurate model of its planned site. You can visualize 3D point-cloud data sets, panoramic images, and site plans simultaneously. You can generate intelligent 3D plant components for piping, steelwork, and equipment items, component by component. The benefit of AVEVA Laser Modeller that caught my eye is that it can help make modules built off-site more accurate, greatly reducing on-site fixes.

Now, both these products work with AVEVA's information management and integrated engineering and design systems, which is what is truly the most interesting part of these announcements, IMHO. Because what they do is enable you to create intelligent as-built and as-planned representations of your process plant that are easy to access, update, and communicate. And they do it as automatically as possible, saving time and money. Which is how it should be.

You can learn more about AVEVA's IntelliLaser and Laser Modeller from today's Pick of the Week write-up. Sign-up for the webinar on AVEVA Laser Modeller when you can spare a half hour. It's pretty good.

Thanks, pal. -- Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

Read today's Pick of the Week write-up.

This is sponsored content. See how it works.