One way in which the water design professional can overcome the complex design challenges faced is by incorporating Devotech iDAS with Autodesk Civil 3D. Devotech iDAS is a water solution design & analysis software built for the South African market, it provides innovative civil engineering design software solutions to our industry – helping the water professional overcome the hurdles that are currently faced in the industry. Autodesk’s Civil 3D® is a civil engineering design software that helps the water professional in optimising project workflows, improving project delivery, maintaining more consistent data and processes, and responding faster to project changes.

Through its integration with Autodesk Civil 3D, Devotech iDAS offers the water professional all the powerful BIM functionality of Autodesk Civil 3D as well as the intelligent pipe network tools needed to design intelligent water infrastructure. The application of these technologies is helping organisations streamline time-consuming tasks such as pipe network layouts and manual grading with specific tools and customisable design standards.

Pipe networks are still designed statically today, despite the availability of intelligent technologies. Sewer, water, stormwater & bulk reticulations form-critical infrastructure and need to be sized and designed optimally, all of which can be achieved using Autodesk Civil 3D & iDAS. Today we will be looking at stormwater design.

Below are our top 5 benefits of using Autodesk Civil 3D & iDAS for stormwater design are as follows:

• A dedicated stormwater network catalogue has been developed to allow the clients to use local and network-specific components in the stormwater network. This entails the pipe catalogues most widely used by South African municipalities as well as international pipe catalogues already found in Civil 3D or could be custom-built.
• Two types of catchment areas are available – namely: pre-development catchment areas and post-development catchment areas.
• Parcels / even areas can be zoned differently to post-development catchment areas, with the designer being able to specify run-off factors for each of these zones. For example roads, residential, business, parks, etc.
• Culverts can be placed easily by importing culvert data from Microsoft Excel or CSV file formats, or manually. The designer can also create detailed culvert long sections automatically, with each culvert having built-in analysis parameters that automatically update with changes to the culvert or stormwater model.
• The stormwater network can be optimised by using hydrodynamic analysis. Pipe sizes are automatically calculated either by using the Devotech iDAS internal analysis engine or by importing the analysis results from SSA. The complete network can also be exported to SSA for advanced analysis if required.

As can be seen above, the dynamic nature and technical versatility of the iDAS add-in for Autodesk Civil 3D enhances water infrastructure design by adding that intelligent optimization and design functionality to ensure that you do not remain stagnant in your water infrastructure design processes. Need to know more? Get in touch with us

Co – Written By: Noluthando Javu & Shuaib Yunos | Baker Baynes PTY ltd | 15 May 2020