Benched wall quantities

[Neilw_05]

I have the task of determining the face area of a benched retaining wall from a corridor. I used a benched daylight subassembly to model the wall. Is there a subassembly I could use that will give me a benched wall with quantities?

C3D 2011

[jmayo-EE]

This isn't what your looking for Neil but maybe it will help if you can't get it from the corridor. When I need face area of a wall I profile the top & bottom of wall into their own profile views. I superimpose the top of wall profile into the view of the bottom (or vice versa). I then place a boundary in between the two profiles & I label the pline. The label accounts for the vertical scale factor with an expression. If I need a block count, I draw a line for each course & use a line label with an expression to account for block length.

John

[Neilw_05]

That is a clever approach John. Since the benches can vary with changes to the roadway design profile, how do you extract the alignments and profiles for the walls?

[jmayo-EE]

That depends on how I built the wall. If I did it with a corridor, the wall alignments were part of the design & I more than likly used that profile with top & bottom of wall to massage the design. If it's a feature line wall, I will copy the feature lines to a new site, flatten & explode them & create alignments with those objects.

John

[Neilw_05]

I may not understand your approach. In my scenario the benched walls are automatically created by the subassembly so I don't have alignments and profiles for them. I could extract them from the corridor but they would not be dynamic to changes in the corridor. I'm hoping there is a subassembly that can give me wall quantities. If not, I think your solution would be the next best option to get quantities.

[SethHall]

Hi Neil-

Forgive me if I am not fully grasping what you are trying to accomplish, but from the sounds of your conversation this seems like it could be accomplished with QTO. Possibly assigning a pay item with an area value such as SQFT to the "wall" portion of your subassembly may provide the desired results.

Hope this helps!

[Neilw_05]

I haven't used QTO for something like this Seth but as far as I know it would require somehow extracting the enclosed wall areas from the corridor in order to compute the areas of the face of each bench. This would be a manual process that would have to be repeated whenever the road design changes.

I'm hoping for a solution that is dynamic to changes in the design if possible!

[SethHall]

Hi Neil-

I was thinking more along the lines of assigning a SQFT pay item to the BENCH and DAYLIGHT links in the code set styles, and doing the Takeoff from there. Similar to what I did with the PAVE link in this blog post: QTO: Just the Basics

Forgive me if I am still misunderstanding. Hope this helps!

[Neilw_05]

As I am not up to speed with QTO yet I'm needing to know how you would use the corridor code set to get a closed area for the walls. It wasn't clear to me fomr the The blog page you gave.

Here is a screen grab showing the wall areas I need to compute. I did this in Power Civil by extracting the 3D edges and used them to build 3D surfaces (not TINS). I was then able to tally the areas from the surface properties.

[SethHall]

Attached is a few screen shots (video was too large) illustrating what I am trying to describe. I would be interested to see if the number generated by this process matches or comes close to what you have already determined.

[jmayo-EE]

Nifty Seth thanks.

Neil, I would relaly like to know how that works with the rwall subs. Please post back if you try it & report what calc you compared it to.

Thanks,

John

[Neilw_05]

I tried the code set idea but I'm not getting comparable results. How can I analyze what the software is doing to get it's quantities?

Here are the values I'm getting between the 2 applications:

Power Civil: 3246 SF

C3D 1487 SF

I'm posting the files if anyone wants to have a crack at it. Be aware the file is C3D 2011 format.

Concepts.dwg=C3D model

3A OPT 2.dwg=Power Civil output

[jmayo-EE]

3136 from my calc.

John

[jmayo-EE]

I should have used offset alignments to keep the alignments & profiles dynamic.

John

[jmayo-EE]

Using the offset alignments as subassembly targets should produce a better profile & computation.

John

[Neilw_05]

Thanks John. I agree using offset alignments would have been better but I see the concept. Nice approach!

I hope to hear from Seth as to whether he was able to make it work with corridor codes. That would be ideal if it's possible.

[SethHall]

Hi Neil-

I hope to test this sometime today. I will be sure to update with what I can find out.

John- I am not sure if I understand your post, were you able to come up 3136 SQFT using QTO or another method?

[jmayo-EE]

I found the profile area. The file I posted shows my work.

John

[Neilw_05]

Seth,

Per one of John's earlier replies, he has created offset alignments and profiles coincident with the tops and bottoms of each bench and sampled the FG surface for each offset. This gives a separate profile of the walls at each top and bottom. To compute the areas he superimposes the bottom profile onto the top profile to create a closed area. Then he traces the area with a polyline and adds a label with a field to report it's area. It's not totally dynamic but it gets the job done.

In order to optimize the route for the road I need to adjust the alignment and profile and get updated quantities so I would like to find a dynamic solution.

[fcernst]

Seth,

I an trying to solve the wall face area problem with QTO. I am using a link code set Pay Item (with no formula). 

I made the link (Generic Vertical Deflection) 10' tall with a 1' offset. When I run QTO for 100' of corridor stationing it is returning 100 sqft, which would be the 2D projected plan area (1'x100').

I'm looking for something close to 10'x100' = 1000 sqft for this hypothetical "wall face".

Does QTO return only 2D area for the corridor links?