I have been asked to do volume calculations using Civil 3D for some concrete piles for a oil/survey company. I have done volume calculations for site and land development projects but nothing to do with concrete piles before. It also appears I am the only person with any Civil 3D back ground in the office. I did mention my experience with Civil 3D was limited but I was trying to expand it by looking for Civil 3D jobs and working through the 2012 Mastering AutoCAD Civil 3D book.
I am assuming doing volume calculations for concrete piles is quite different from doing volume calculations for grading plans. The company has been primary using AutoCAD Maps and doesn't have much set up for AutoCAD Civil 3D yet. If someone has some suggestion that could help that would be greatly appreciated.
Welcome aboard 🙂
You're in luck - piles in the oilpatch are very simple, much simpler than with cut/fill volumes. There will be only a handful of sizes (in many cases three or less), so once identified you only need to calculate the volume for each size/class and multiply it by the number of instances.
DWG-wise, this can be done in 2D with simple blocks and appropriate attributes and counted via data extraction. In 3D it can be a little trickier, but with some coding the volume of a regular solid is directly readable. It also has the advantage of handling less-regular solids, such as vessel or compressor bases.
Well the version of AutoCAD I am using here at the office is Civil 3D 2014 which I never used before. I have only done volume calculations for cut and fill for land development and very new to oil-patch work.
This is my first job directly dealing with oil industry sadly so I am not fully aware of all the terminology used. I believe the calculations they want me to do is simple concrete piles in the ground or bore holes for geological reports. Neither of which I have experience in doing. I don’t have much experience in coding volumes for different materials. Is there a process you can suggest I try when approaching these assignments?
How would you do it in 2D with simple blocks? What attributes would those blocks need to have to extract the proper data. How I usually went about volume calculations is creating two different surfaces and comparing the two and see what Civil 3D shows me.
My training in using any new computer program was to do the problem by hand and then compare that answer to the computer programs answer. If they were in the same order of magnitude, I accepted that I had modeled the problem correctly in the computer.
So do the problem by hand first, then look at the steps you've taken, then try to computerize those steps.
So essentially, you have to get the lenght of the pile, multiply that times the area of the pile, that's volume 1.
Of course if the pile has a step in it, usually it's the top is smaller than the bottom, make two calculations with different lengths and differnt areas, add the resulting volumes together.
Repeat as needed.
This might be a job for Geotechnical portion of Civil 3d, check your subscription.
My first thought is to reach for my Construction Master calculator ($50 at Home Depot). That's how I've always figured concrete volumes. But then I thought of the possibilities of using C3D with the report functions and extruding the piles to the correct depth to view them in 3D. Overkill, possibly.
Do you just need to calculate a pile or two, or are there thousands of them? Is the diameter consistant or stepped?
Dave
Dave Stoll
Las Vegas, Nevada
BD,
I've been playing. I drew 5 circles at the elevation of my ground, diameter=4', extruded them down 100', then used MassProp command. Voila! Of course the volume is in cubic feet, so you'd have to convert to cubic yards to order concrete.
Dave
Dave Stoll
Las Vegas, Nevada
If you want to use C3D's volume and/or reporting tools, draw the lower circle. Use mapclean to turn them into plines. Offset this inside by .01 units. Make a surface for one pile with the two plines. Copy the surface to the other locations.
If you want all of the piers in one surface place all of the plines into it. Draw a big rectangle surounding them all and use this as a hide boundary for the surface. Then take each outer circle/pline and add them to the surface as show boundaries.
John Mayo
John,
Thanks, but you went way over my head with that one. I thought I had surfaces figured out, but I've got a ways to go. And I would very much like to learn more about the reporting tools, so I think I'll head over to the tutorials and help section.
Dave
Dave Stoll
Las Vegas, Nevada
You'll also need to make the weeding and supplementing factors quite small to preserve the curvature of the circles.
This is a similar technique to one that I use quite regularly to calculate the concrete volumes for wind turbine bases
neilyj (No connection with Autodesk other than using the products in the real world)
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