Basin design with SCALGO Live
- Cas d’utilisation
Are you looking for inspiration on how to combine SCALGO Live terrain designs with your CAD work? Then have a look at this short story from Silkeborg, Denmark.
At Silkeborg Utility, engineer Line Phillipsen works, with designing stormwater basins for greenfield developments. A while back, she worked with a housing development in Kragelund, a village in the municipality of Silkeborg.
Figure 1. A photo of the constructed basin in wintertime. It is a traditional wet detention pond that treats stormwater from the new development site and some of the surrounding areas.
The location for a basin is usually established earlier in the planning process and described in the local development plan by the municipality. In her basin designs, Line also needs to live up to national guidelines. All in all, there are several aspects that Line must consider in her work.
“I am usually restricted to specific locations, areas, volumes, inlet and outlet levels and more that my designs need to live up to,” Line tells.
In Kragelund, the basin was set to be placed in the North-Western part of the development site. Initially, there seemed to be enough space for a basin, however, when Line started to work on the design, it was discovered that a fringe of old oak trees would cause some challenges.
“Old oak trees are protected”, Line explains, “and this means that we cannot dig where they have roots. So, we needed to assess how these trees would affect the area reserved for the basin.”
In Figure 2, dots are the locations of the oak trees’ stems and the line to the south marks the extent of their crowns and hence the area where digging is not permitted.
“With this we lost approximately 8 meters of the area that was reserved for the basin”, Line says. “Luckily, we could move one of the plots to another location on the development site to create more space for the basin. Otherwise, it would not have been possible to create the necessary volume.”
Figure 2. Old oak trees on the fringe of the development site restricted where the basin could be placed, and one of the plots had to be moved to another location.
A detailed design in SCALGO Live
Line designs basins entirely in SCALGO Live.
“SCALGO Live is very user-friendly. The terrain editing tools are easy and I have full control of basin side slopes etc.”, Line says, “and I can easily make changes to the design as we move along. I do not need any other software to design the basin as we want it.”
Figure 3. Line uses terrain editing in SCALGO Live to create basins that fully comply with the design guidelines.
SCALGO Live also calculates cut and fill numbers making it easy to estimate expected costs for the excavation of the basin.
Once the design is finalized, Line exports an xyz-file from SCALGO Live and imports into a CAD software to create detailed contours that help generate technical drawings.
Figure 4. In CAD the xyz-file from SCALGO Live is easily shaped into detailed contour lines of the basin.
In the final step Line gets help from their technical designer:
“What we then need is a drawing that we can send to entrepreneurs to get offers. This is done in CAD by our technical designer. She converts the contours into a specific format and includes technical details, for example, piping systems.”
Figure 5. A technical designer creates the final blueprint that is used for the tender.
“I use SCALGO Live because it is easy and fast, and I constantly have a good overview of the project and the design”, Line concludes.
Want to know more?
Do not hesitate to contact us at info@scalgo.com to hear more about how you can make detailed terrain designs.
