Under construction in Limpopo province is the world’s largest dry-cooled coal-fired power station, the 4800 MW Medupi power plant. As part of the project implementation, Royal HaskoningDHV has been appointed to provide professional engineering services for the electrical power installation, also referred to as the P11 package. This P11 package involves the design, supply and commissioning of the following:
* Cable racking and cabling.
* Cable management system including cable pull cards, termination cards, cable drum status reports, and cable schedules.
* Lighting and small power.
* Earthing.
In order for RoyalHaskoningDHV to carry out the cable management system on the Medupi Project, the cable and drum management module provided by SmartPlant Electrical software was chosen. This package was developed by Intergraph and the requisite real-time functionality was added to the software to meet the client’s requirements.
Royal HaskoningDHV is the first company worldwide to use the cable and drum management module. It has trained a large team of specialist engineers and technicians to execute the cable and drum management tasks using the SmartPlant Electrical software tool.
This tool enables the following:
* Cable data import allows the importation of cable reference data such as size, impedance, number of cores and cable construction etc. as supplied by the cable manufacturers. This data is then stored in a relational database either Oracle or Microsoft SQL for use in executing deliverable reports.
* The automatic sizing of cables using the cable reference data – the length of cable, rated voltage, number of phases and load current – allows the software to size the selected cables. Another advantage is the ability to size the cables in batch mode, whereby multiple cables can be sized automatically by the click of a button. This process allows the engineers to focus their time on other areas of the project, eliminating tedious repetitive work.
* Cable drum optimisation to ensure minimal cable wastage. This is also an automated process taking all the cables selected and assigning them to the cables drums according to a specified reference cable type. Filters can be used here in cases where a specific drum should not be used for a particular reason. Specific pulling areas for different part of plant can be included if required.
Using this tool Royal HaskoningDHV created customised reports including:
* Cable pull cards used by the cable pulling teams. These cards contain information such as the ‘from’ and ‘to’ destinations of the cable, the type of cable that should be pulled, its design length and the shortest possible routing path for the cable. Cable teams are required to fill in the metre marks where the cable was taken from the drum and to sign off that the cable was pulled giving accountability to a team supervisor and providing critical information of actual length of cable which can be compared with that estimated by the designer, thus optimising the process.
* Cable termination cards used by the teams for terminating the cable ends to the equipment. This card contains information as to the specific equipment to where the cable ends are to be connected as well as the connection information.
* Cable schedules for summary of cables per area of plant. These reports contain information on all the cable load data, its source and destination equipment, and the results of the sizing calculations done. They also contain the length of the cables and shortest cable routing path which the cable should take to get from its source to destination.
* Drum status reports for drum stock-yard control and management. These contain information summarising cable drum stock. Using this report procurement can quickly make a decision as to what cable drums need to be ordered for the next phase of the project. This also enables stock-yard control to know where the drums are, whether it be on site in the yard or empty, making locating drums easier and reducing theft which is a common issue where there are large amounts of copper cable.
* Drum optimisation reports used for detailed information on cable to drum relationships. This is a detailed version of the drum status report and contains information on the number of cables and where they were pulled from a specific drum by using metre marks that are filled in by the cable teams. The software can validate that the cable was in fact pulled off the assigned drum using total cable length on drum and total cable length left on drum.
All these reports contain revision and date information allowing for archiving of reports.
However, stakeholders in potential new projects are not limited to the above-mentioned deliverables due to the fact that the report templates can be tailored to the requirements of a specific project by the SmartPlant Engineers.
The SmartPlant Electrical software is assisting the Royal HaskoningDHV to provide an efficient cable management system. The company plans to use this software on other projects, in particular projects that utilise SmartPlant3D services modelling as this will reduce engineering time even further.
For more information contact Jason Hammond, Royal HaskoningDHV, +27 (0)12 367 5800, jason.hammond@rhdhv.com, www.rhdhv.co.za
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