Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Update on the MCC's and panel schedules in Revit MEP -

First up - thanks to David May at Eaton, and Martin Schmid at Autodesk for their help on this item...sometimes having extra eyes helps you to change perspective.

So how do you work with an MCC, and create a panel schedule? My confusion started by using the out-of-the-box MCC components, which represent groups of sections in one part of an MCC. We had been trying to figure out how to tie all of these to one panel schedule, but weren't getting it right - so we asked for help.

The problem was my approach - in a water treatment plant, you can have a wide variety of motors and values that are hooked  up to a single MCC - so the right solution is to treat the MCC as one panel, and ignore the sections. Our buddies at Eaton provided us with a Revit family for each MCC, once we used their BID Manager tool (http://www.eaton.com/EGDRCUS/US/OrderManagement/BidManager/index.htm) to layout how the components would be connected - then they built the MCC's for us and sent back the model (to which we added our own conduit surface connectors, to run the conduit out to the main sections). All we needed to do from this point was connect the motors to these panels so the load was tracked, and associated with the correct sections. We're also working on from-to parameters for the conduit runs as well, and I'm looking into how we can create this association automatically.

One other important note - with VFD controls on some motors (like pumps) the VFD acts as a panel - so you need to go through the VFD to the MCC to make sure it's circuited corrrectly.

The next part I'm working on is using the Revit DBLink feature to associate data from their exported MDB file that was provided with the panel - so that over current protection, circuit breaker, and other additional data we might include in the panel schedule for each section can be associated back to the MCC. I'll make another post when we get this worked out...

I may be a little slow, but I'm getting there with a lot of help from friends...

thanks - David B.

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