2. The CAVETM
project’s goal is to reduce
construction and maintenance costs
for nuclear power plants.
By Jill Clelland
Readers with great memories may recall an
article from the Q4 2001 Insight (“Cutting
Construction Costs”), which discussed
linking the detailed 3D model for
Westinghouse Electric Co.’s advanced nuclear
power plant to its construction schedule.
Using Intergraph SmartPlant®
Review, we
were able to shorten the construction cycle
(which greatly reduces our construction
costs), ensure the buildability of the plant
as designed and use the model as an infor-
mational tool for both technical and
nontechnical audiences. That was all within
the SmartPlant Review application.
In the last few years, my, how this tech-
nique has grown.
We’ve progressed from reviewing the 3D
and 4D (3D plus time) nuclear island on a
27-inch widescreen computer monitor to
using several different immersive technologies.
We have the capability in-house to project
the model – 3D and 4D – in stereo video.
It turns out that it’s a relatively easy thing
to do, if you have a 3Dlabs Wildcat graph-
ics card and about US$30,000. We
purchased a low-end yet very usable off site
portable projector system, and we have
used the system for presentations. We’ve
had audiences of more than 100 people
using this technique simultaneously.
We also use a much less expensive method of
viewing the model in stereo for audiences
of four or less – US$50 shutter glasses and
a monitor capable of handling at least 100
Hz (plus the Wildcat graphics card). These
methods all use native SmartPlant Review,
so there’s no additional software to learn or
models to export – just flip the switch on
stereo display within SmartPlant Review,
and it’s there immediately.
But what turns people’s heads is the Cave
Automatic Virtual Environment, or
CAVE™, by Fakespace Systems.
Designing future nuclear plants
Westinghouse Electric Co. partnered with
Penn State University and several other
organizations to test the suitability of
immersive projection display (IPD)
technology, such as the CAVE, to design
future nuclear power plants. The Nuclear
Energy Research Institute (NERI) funded a
project to see if this type of information
technology can help improve arrangements
and reduce both construction and mainte-
nance costs as has been done using
full-scale mockups.
The cave is a five-sided (4 walls and a floor)
room, 10 feet by 10 feet by 9 feet. It is
connected to an array of computers that
control and coordinate projections onto the
five surfaces to “immerse” people within
the room in a virtual space. Picture a
holideck from “Star Trek,” but dial it down
a few notches.
Technology at Work
• See George Westinghouse article, page 18
3. The system operates by using large high-
resolution back-projection systems. These
systems project computer-generated images
onto the backside of the walls. Using
specialized software, the images appear to
be continuous from one wall to the next,
and the effects of the room corners all but
disappear. A stereoscopic image is created
using active viewing glasses that are in sync
with the images. The system may be used to
render in full or reduced size, or to enlarge
almost any type of object in full stereo-
scopic view. With suitable tools, one may
move through a virtual environment.
As you can imagine, this setup requires a
tremendous amount of computative horse-
power to keep five stereo images synchro-
nized and able to reflect real-time
movement. The project team found that we
could only load relatively small amounts of
the model into the CAVE at a time.
Discovering design problems early
For the first part of the NERI project, we
loaded one two-story room that has about
10 different systems going through it.
Currently, there is no direct export or link
from SmartPlant Review to VRML (Virtual
Reality Modeling Environment Language).
We had to create a SmartPlant Review
session with only the models that were
needed, then manually convert the
MicroStation .dgn native files into VRML,
which Penn State then imported into
MultiGen-Paradigm’s Vega real-time
simulation application. Penn State then
installed SmartPlant Review on a machine
directly outside the cave, to allow the team to
define intelligence within the environment,
and also for the SmartPlant Review operator
to interact audially with the CAVE users.
This full-scale virtual mockup was used for
several purposes. First, our designers
reviewed it by doing a “walkthrough,”
looking for any errors or inconsistencies.
The full-scale immersive 3D effect was
definitely beneficial, as a few items were
almost immediately spotted and marked for
modification. One specific item was the
weld location for a pipe. In the original
design, there wasn’t enough space to weld
fully around the pipe. The immersive 3D
environment made it easy to check for this
and to determine a new weld point without
any such problems.
Our .dgn files are mostly separated by
construction activity for this room. Thus
Penn State researchers were able to mimic
SmartPlant Review’s 4D construction
module by turning on and off model files,
following the Primavera schedule. They
were also able to simulate the “move
display set” feature, thus reviewing the
installation paths of the various modules
for interferences and collisions.
Optimizing construction time
One of the interesting results from this
project was that neophytes were able to
perform meaningful schedule optimization
work in mere hours. Several groups of
construction management students, with a
construction industry expert, reviewed the
room and the schedule to look for an
optimal construction schedule, with
various constraints.
By using the CAVE, the students were able
to reduce the schedule for this room by
about 30 percent. What’s amazing about this
is that these teams did this in one day’s time.
Technology at Work
(Continued on next page)
This series of screenshots demonstrates how visualization
tools can be used to plan nonconstruction activities, as
well. Westinghouse can compare the 3D model with the
schedule to ensure that all relevant parts are available
for planned system tests.
4. try many different methods of performing
a maintenance task until they find the way
that has the lowest radiation dosage.
While the cave is an expensive technology,
it has the ability to bring about large
positive impacts to a project in virtually any
stage of development. However, some
universities with CAVEs may rent time in
them to outside companies. It’s worth
considering, if you have a complex, costly
first-of-a-kind engineering project.
Jill Clelland is the advanced plant information
lead for passive plant development at
Westinghouse Electric Co. in Monroeville,
Pennsylvania USA.
www.westinghouse.com
www.ap1000.westinghouse.com
Editor’s note: For more on Westinghouse
Electric Co.’s innovative uses of visualization
software, see “Pushing the (SmartPlant
Review) Envelope” online at ppo.inter-
graph.com/library/spr-westinghouse.asp
NewsBytes
The Next Step
(Continued from previous page)
Technology at Work
With traditional methods, it would take
more than a day to simply get all of the
various diagrams and drawings organized,
and the team would probably still not have
a firm idea of how it would look in reality.
By using the immersive reality technology,
people transcend the mundane, yet neces-
sary, tasks of visualizing in their heads and
move to the real meat of the problem – in
this case, tightening the schedule while
ensuring buildability.
Yet another use of this virtual mockup has
been maintenance studies. A Penn State
researcher created a real-time dosimeter
simulation that works with the room. A
user puts on virtual reality gloves and some
other locating devices. Based on where the
person is virtually in the room, the dosimeter
gives different readings. So, operators can
