AutoCAD P&ID

[#1]

I have an instrument Bubble that is placed in a Panel.  The Panel is a piece of equipment and it has a tag.  When I place the instrument bubble, I would like it to find the Panel tag and have that tag show in the Data Manager.  I thought that this could be accomplished with an Acquisition, but I can’t make it work.  Can this be done?  Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

This would be possible through a "chain" of acquisition rules. You would have to connect the instruments to the panel somehow. Either by using a leader line, instrument supply line, etc. Or create a brand new line for this and place it on the "No plot" layer so it won't show up on the printed P&ID.

So you have the panel, with it's tag number. Then you have the line connecting the instrument to the panel. The line would acquire the instrument tag and then the instrument would acquire the tag from the line. This could be shown on a report from Data Manager.

Add a new property to the line (in this case I just used a leader line)

Give it a name and set it to be an acquisition rule. Point it to Engineering Items -> Equipment -> Tag

Add a new property to the General Instrument Symbols

Give it a name and set it to be an acquisition rule. Point it to Engineering Items -> Lines -> Signal Line Segments -> Leader

Select the new acquisition property you just configured for the Line

This also works well for reporting instruments tags associated with equipment on a report.

Thank you,

[#3]

Jason, this works perfect, but when I try to the same to create a 'plant connection' for instruments, the instrument lines are not present in the classes when defining the acquisition ....

Would you also hav a way to retreive the input and output from instruments through this procedure ? I manage to create just one connection. 

[#4]

Hi Peter,

Are you wanting to connect an instrument to a process line and have it acquire the process data?

Thank you,

[#5]

Jason, that would be the case, there needs to be a connection to the pipe or equipment where the instrument is physically connected

there should also be another coonection : to the equipment or so that is controlled by the instrument (fe a flow measurment on a line could really control the level in a vessel). that makes it possible to list all instruments grouped by equipment. It's possible to this by hand in a text field, but a graphical selection is so much easier ...    

[#6]

I too would like to obtain process data from the pipe line in the instrument. I was planning on setting up an acquisition chain (Pipe Line Pres/Temp/Flow --> Instrument Supply Line --> Field Disc. Instrument). But when I opened the Signal Line Segments properties and tried to add an acquisition rule to pull from Pipe Line Segments, the "Lines" class is not available.

My only guess that this is happening is that the acquisition rule is set up not to reference objects of the same class (since both Pipe Line Segments and Signal Line Segments belong to the Lines class).

Can anyone confirm this? And if so, is this something that Autodesk can change?

The ability to pull process data from the pipe line into the instrument was one of the reasons we made the switch to AutoCAD P&ID from SmartPlant. Pulling the process data through the instrument supply line would be the ideal way to make that happen.

Thanks,

Craig

[#7]

Craig,

Did you find any solution for your problem?

I was trying to connect all instrument bubbles to their respective pipe lines, but an aquisition is not possible.

Any known workaround?

[#8]

Sort of...

I ended up adding another 'link' in my acquisition chain in order to have the offline instruments acquire the line number and process data from the process line. I call it a "PIC", and it acquires data from the processs line. Then the instrument supply line acquires the data from the PIC. Lastly, the Instrument bubble acquires the data from the instrument supply line. It's an added step, but it accomplishes our goal. Here is a detail of one that I put in some customization notes:

FYI - I created the PICs within the hand valves class, since sometimes we shown them with valves. The parent class of PICs contains no valves, and I have one variation of a PIC that is just a straight line, so that it looks like instrument supply line on a finished drawing (pdf/printed). The sub-class of PICs contains the valves, since I don't want people substituting non-valve PICs with PICs containing tagged valves.

Hopefully this helps steer you in the right direction.

Thanks,

Craig

[#9]

Thanks for the description!

For the moment, I made up a new pipeline (and called it "instrument line"), which hands over the information from the main pipeline to the instrument bubble.

Since we mostly don't have pipeline reports, this is no problem...but I don't like it at all.

There should be a possibility to assign/attach lines and components regardeless to their physical connection...