KOPEC's Nuclear Power Plant Project Honored With BE Award

Exton, PA – KOPEC, an engineering firm specializing in the design and construction of power plants, used Bentley's PlantSpace to design a Korean nuclear power plant. It was the first time a Korean nuclear power plant had ever been designed completely using 3D software. The project won KOPEC a BE Award for the Shin-Kori Nuclear Power Plant in Korea. The award category was "Plant: Multidiscipline Engineering."

The BE Awards of Excellence, which are selected by an independent jury of industry experts and presented at an evening ceremony during the annual BE Conference, honor the extraordinary work of Bentley users improving the world's infrastructure. These projects set benchmarks for their industries, and showcase the imagination and technical mastery of the organizations that created them. This year's BE Awards of Excellence ceremony takes place May 22 in Charlotte, N.C.

KOPEC is the prime contractor providing architectural, engineering, and other services for Kansai Electric Power Company's Shin-Kori Nuclear Plant Unit 1 and Unit 2. The plant is being constructed on the southeastern coast of the Korean Peninsula.

KOPEC employed an engineering workflow based on the use of a single 3D plant model that improved design accuracy and consistency while reducing design and construction costs. As KOPEC's JikLae Jo, engineering group supervisor for Shin-Kori Unit 1 and Unit 2, explained, "Modeling the entire plant in 3D saved a considerable amount of time. The 3D model was used to automatically generate orthographic and isometric drawings with minimal effort."

Continued Jo, "We reinvested the time that was saved by increasing the detail of the model and spending more time checking it for potential interferences and other issues. We also developed a standard 3D design management workflow that provides real-time communication among project engineers to manage the design work throughout the project lifecycle."

The Shin-Kori units are two-loop, light-water-moderated and cooled pressurized water reactor systems rated at 2,825 megawatts each, with electrical output of 1,000 megawatts. Each unit includes about 3,300 pieces of equipment, 250,000 feet of piping, and 54,000 supports.

Using Bentley's MicroStation, PlantSpace, and the TriForma extension for MicroStation, KOPEC modeled all piping, equipment, structural, and architectural elements and brought them together in a single model. Component information was entered into the PlantSpace database and used to track all of the project materials. Even the individual pipe supports were modeled and entered into the 3D model using Support Manager. The PlantSpace Model Control System was used to control access to the various components in the model, allowing hundreds of engineers to work simultaneously on the single 3D model without conflicts.

Added Jo, "We selected Bentley for the modeling tools used in this project because Bentley provides the most powerful platform for designing large plants as a single 3D model. For example, the Model Control System makes it easy to enforce our standard design procedures for the production of isometric drawings, piping layout drawings, and stress analysis for the various units of the plant. Likewise, the Interference Manager provides a powerful tool that automates clash detection."

SOURCE: Korea Power Engineering Company