Program offers engineers electronic drawings
Recent headlines on the energy crisis, particularly those on the problems of California, have focused on the need for new power plants. The stories overlook how technology can be employed to improve the productivity of existing facilities.
Since early 1998, the Nebraska Public Power District (NPPD), Nebraska’s largest electric utility, has been implementing a systematic overhaul of its telecommunications system. The upgrade allows the utility’s 400 field personnel electronic access to more than 140,000 drawings. The drawings, which range in size from 8.5 inches by 11 inches to 30 inches by 42 inches, are wiring diagrams, schematics and structural drawings of NPPD’s nuclear plant, three steam plants, nine hydroelectric facilities, nine diesel plants, three peaking units and its transmission and distribution network.
Previously, NPPD would create 10 to 12 sets of aperture cards of a drawing or an amended drawing that would then be distributed to various departments. To access a drawing, an engineer had to locate the correct aperture card and take it to a microfilm viewer to read it. NPPD had used outside agencies to convert the microform drawings to electronic images, which were stored as TIFF group/4 images. New drawings were being created in AutoCAD and were then exported to CAL group/4 images.
The problem was making those images available to the engineers electronically so they could quickly and easily access them on NPPD’s secure Intranet. NPPD solved the problem by using a program called TIFFSurfer from Placentia, Calif.-based VisionShape. The program is a plug-in application that handles both TIFF and CAL group/4 images. It has a zoom and pan feature that allows an area of detail in any of the complex drawings to be located quickly.
NPPD estimates its savings on microfilming costs (it still microfilms one copy for archival purposes), filing and refiling of aperture cards, time and labor for locating, accessing and updating drawings to be more than $1 million a year. For more information, check the utility’s Web site at www.nppd.com.
