Richard Carpenter, professional surveyor and president of Accurate Technologies Inc., can’t understand why 3-D laser scanner technology, used in industrial surveying to create accurate 3-D models of objects or environments, isn’t more prevalent in the U.S. — but he has a few ideas.
“We don’t jump on new technology,” he says. “Some of the people who come out of college in mechanical engineering are lucky if they even took one 3-D CAD class. Some of the architects coming out of school haven’t had a full semester of 3-D CAD. So we’re a little bit slow to get on this, but it’s an incredible technology.”
Carpenter should know. He has been running his own industrial surveying business since 1987, having worked in The Timken Co.’s steel mill engineering facility for 10 years, where he learned the mechanical aspects of surveying.
“Years ago, most industrial firms had their own engineering departments and they provided most of their own services. They really didn’t go to outside people,” he says. When Timken, and other industrial companies, reduced staff in their engineering departments, the mechanical surveying that had once been provided in-house wasn’t available. “It went from a market where 90 percent of the work was done in-house to probably 90 percent of the work now is subcontracted.”
That’s when Carpenter started getting calls to do mechanical surveying work.
“I started getting enough part-time work that within a few months I was busy full time,” Carpenter says.
Finding a niche
When Accurate Technologies first got started it mainly helped install equipment to achieve the higher accuracies that the industrial firms were demanding. The company would work with mechanical equipment installers to put in mill equipment. The contractor would get the equipment within 1/16 of an inch, and then call Accurate Technologies to get the final alignment.
“When you’re dealing with moving parts, heavy equipment and high horsepower motors and gearboxes, misalignment creates problems,” Carpenter says. Misalignment could damage product as it comes off the machines, which means a company could be scrapping product because the equipment is not aligned right.
“And that’s the No. 1 reason people call us,” Carpenter says. “For us a good project is when someone says they’re scrapping 6 to 7 percent of what they run, and we get done and they’re scrapping 0.5 percent or 1 percent. That happens to us quite often with steel mill equipment or any industrial equipment.”
Matching people with technology
In order for the company to grow with the work that was available, it had to train employees to do industrial surveying from within because people with those skills weren’t prevalent in the market.
Land surveyors, those who have the closest skills to industrial, are taught to make ground measurements that are accurate to 1/8 of an inch, far from the 1/1,000 of an inch accuracy needed in industrial work. In addition, much of the equipment and processes used by land surveyors isn’t suited for industrial survey work. Now, with laser trackers and scanners, it’s especially true — the equipment is very different.
The 3-D laser trackers employed by industrial surveyors use laser systems to “draw” surfaces it comes in contact with. It provides 3-D coordinates that translate to 3-D positions in space.
In addition to the tracker, industrial surveyors also have 3-D laser scanners. The equipment can shoot 900,000 points per second for every 1/16 or 1/8 of an inch, and each point has an XYZ position. This results in a point cloud — billions of points interpreted by software that analyzes common features in the points. These commonalities could translate into cylinders, flat surfaces, piping, etc. The result is a 3-D drawing of all the elements of the space being shot.
“Jobs that used to take me one month I’m doing in two days with this scanner, and giving 100 times the information I had before, if not 1,000 times,” Carpenter says.
In the past it took a high-precision surveyor to do industrial work because everything was done with optics. Optics means using traditional instruments — a surveyor’s transit — and relying on a surveyor’s ability to read a scale to 1/64 of an inch.
“But maintaining accuracy with the optics is very difficult,” he says. “When you deal with optics you have to have two instruments, you have to have a transit to shoot a straight line and an optical level to get the elevations. So whenever you’re using optics you’re really not in a 3-D world.
“Probably 90 percent of industrial work is still done with optics. But the laser tracker can far exceed the work you can do with optics. The speed and the ability to 3-D document what you’re shooting versus handwriting things in field books is quite a difference.”
Seeing into the future
The largely digital technology is allowing Accurate Technologies to undertake projects for engineering firms in Canada and Germany. One of its projects, a steel mill, was scanned entirely so it can be designed on three different continents.
“They’re going to have different engineering people all over the world looking at that information and designing it in unison,” says Carpenter.
“I know this is the future,” he says. However, he says not enough people are being trained properly to enter the field.
“We’re going to be in a 3-D CAD world,” Carpenter says. In the bigger picture, he expects the floor plan of a building and its utilities will get interpreted through geographic information systems, or active 3-D models.
Architects and engineers of the future may walk though a 3-D model of a building and see it in its entirety as it exists. It also allows the user to attach databases, drawings and spreadsheets so he or she can access any information about a facility.
“And there’s already software out there that makes that happen in 3-D. If you had a 3-D model of your facility you could have the ability to look up, down and around and see everything in a model. I think we’re really going to get to that 3-D world fast.” ●
How to reach: Accurate Technologies Inc., (330) 478-9313 or www.accurate-technologies.com
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