Plant environments are often subjected to changes periodically, as companies decide to upgrade their installations, maintain equipment and add new machineries to leverage existing capabilities. With such consistent modifications, there is a need for an ongoing vigilance to ensure that the plant runs smoothly with required efficiency and safety.

However, to meet these requirements, you need to have a well documented plant with detailed visual description, so that you have a better idea on how the plant actually looks today, and the problem areas that are required to be fixed.

With detailed documentation, you are less likely to take a circuitous path to maintenance or upgrade, and save yourself from lengthy and costly investigation. Essentially, documentation serves as a map to your facility that helps in discovering easiest and quickest path to maintain plant, integrate new equipment or technology, create efficient layout for quality product development, minimize plant shutdowns and comply with safety & health norms.

Why Use Reverse Engineering over Manual Measurements

It is high time now to consider manual measuring techniques inaccurate, as when workers use them, they are inevitably missing to record crucial information due to overlooking critical dimension or lacking of precision in measuring tools. Moreover, the hard copies of layouts are vulnerable to disappear, become obsolete or get misplaced.

As a matter of fact, employees spending their time in creating, developing, sharing and consuming information, waste at least 3.5 hours weekly on searches that don’t turn up the right information. These inaccuracies, omissions and possibility of losing the documents increase the chances of unexpected interferences and would require unnecessary rework during plant maintenance, upgrades and new installations.

Reverse engineering on the contrary, is safer, easier and accurate way to document plant details through the use of laser scanners and CAD tools. Laser scanning technique captures rich details of the entire scene accurately, which is converted to point clouds that can be easily refined in CAD tools. Since this approach records every detail, there is no need to spend time on measuring everything manually.

In case of any change in the project scope, the as-built design information can be easily modified in CAD environment with few clicks. Moreover, since the recorded data is in digital format, the risk of losing the information gets eliminated. The data can be reused as many times as it is required, maintenance areas can be easily highlighted and clashes with surrounding environment and downtime can be quickly estimated.

Considering the benefits of reverse engineering for documenting industrial plants, it is advisable to keep a digital record of your plant, and ensure that you have the accurate information of your plant. Not only does this technique help in reducing the documentation procedure from months to days, or years to months, it straight away helps in minimizing unnecessary cost and enhances data safety and security.



About Author:

Nikunj Patel is a design engineer working with Hi-Tech CADD Services - CAD Drafting for the past 4 years. He loves designing specialized industrial equipments and can always be found in the lab discussing, brainstorming & tweaking designs.