Westinghouse Electric Company, United States

Virtual Construction: The Next Step in Visualization Innovation

The CAVE™ project's goal is to reduce construction and maintenance costs for nuclear power plants

Westinghouse Electric Co. partnered with Penn State University and several other organizations to test the suitability of immersive projection display (IPD) technology, such as the CAVE, to design future nuclear power plants. The Nuclear Energy Research Institute (NERI) funded a project to see if this type of information technology can help improve arrangements and reduce both construction and maintenance costs as has been done using full-scale mockups.

The cave is a five-sided (4 walls and a floor) room, 10 feet by 10 feet by 9 feet. It is connected to an array of computers that control and coordinate projections onto the five surfaces to "immerse" people within the room in a virtual space. Picture a holideck from "Star Trek," but dial it down a few notches.

The system operates by using large high-resolution back-projection systems. These systems project computer-generated images onto the backside of the walls. Using specialized software, the images appear to be continuous from one wall to the next, and the effects of the room corners all but disappear. A stereoscopic image is created using active viewing glasses that are in sync with the images. The system may be used to render in full or reduced size, or to enlarge almost any type of object in full stereoscopic view. With suitable tools, one may move through a virtual environment.

This setup requires a tremendous amount of computative horsepower to keep five stereo images synchronized and able to reflect real-time movement. The project team found that thet could only load relatively small amounts of the model into the CAVE at a time.

Discovering design problems early

For the first part of the NERI project, they loaded one two-story room that has about 10 different systems going through it. Currently, there is no direct export or link from Intergraph SmartPlant® Review to VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Environment Language). They had to create a SmartPlant Review session with only the models that were needed, then manually convert the MicroStation .dgn native files into VRML, which Penn State then imported into MultiGen-Paradigm's Vega real-time simulation application. Penn State then installed SmartPlant Review on a machine directly outside the cave, to allow the team to define intelligence within the environment, and also for the SmartPlant Review operator to interact audibly with the CAVE users.

This full-scale virtual mockup was used for several purposes. First, Westinghouse designers reviewed it by doing a "walkthrough," looking for any errors or inconsistencies. The full-scale immersive 3D effect was definitely beneficial, as a few items were almost immediately spotted and marked for modification. One specific item was the weld location for a pipe. In the original design, there wasn't enough space to weld fully around the pipe. The immersive 3D environment made it easy to check for this and to determine a new weld point without any such problems.

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