Citipower/Powercor (CP) owns and manages one of Australia’s largest electricity distribution networks, including the poles and wires that deliver electricity to more than a million homes and businesses in Victoria. They are responsible for the quality and reliability of electricity delivered to customers across their networks.
The Challenge
CP is investing in laser scanning its above-ground assets, including substation internals. Therefore, an efficient workflow is needed to translate scanned point clouds into 3D models for use within building information modelling (BIM) and also Virtual Reality (VR) environments.
The Solution
After receiving onsite training from GHD Digital, a CP surveyor rapidly laser scanned and stitched together raw point clouds for the two substations. An efficient workflow was needed which had to incorporate two options for VR publishing.
The point of difference between options was functionality and flexibility. With the first option, products exist for CP to self-publish into VR, through the provision of simple tools and navigation.
Alternatively, GHD Digital has the specialised skills to create powerful interactive experiences and tools using leading gaming technology. A custom panel was built with tools for measuring distance and toggling visibility between BIM model and reality meshes. Each substation was delivered, packaged with this panel, as a standalone VR instance viewable from any VR device. This was not possible with the off-the-shelf product. The project also identified some limits with the size of meshes publishable into VR which is continuously tested and optimised.
The new workflows were presented in a final report to CP, alongside the pros and cons of each option, and other project recommendations.
The Benefit
This project gave CP the capability to use data-as-an-asset by leveraging the captured data to build a ‘digital twin’ of their physical assets for multiple purposes throughout the organisation, from design and performance monitoring through to training. This enabled more effective green field and brown field design and update, integration of multiple data sources, and virtual training on real life assets leading to greater operational transparency, efficiency and worker safety.
For more information please Email Bill Thomson or explore our digital services at www.ghd.com/digital.