Planning a Multibillion Construction Project As a full-service unmanned aerial vehicle service provider, Eye-bot Aerial Solutions captures highly accurate reality data at a rate of 250 acres per hour. The Pennsylvania-based company produces high-resolution 3D reality models and images for organizations in the telecommunications, construction, power and utilities, insurance, and infrastructure industries. Its services include inspection, monitoring, aerial survey, and 3D modeling. In June 2016, Shell Polymers, one of the organizations Eye-bot serves, took the Final Investment Decision to construct a world-scale ethane cracking plant in western Pennsylvania, United States, to create polyethylene. The multibillion Pennsylvania Chemicals Project is positioned in a strategic location where 70 percent of North America’s polyethylene demand is within 700 miles. With proximity to rail, river, and interstate transportation, Shell Polymers can easily bring heavy equipment onto the site and, when the project is completed, easily transfer the polyethylene offsite. The plant is being built where a former zinc smelting facility had been on a 386-acre plot that is approximately 3-ki- lometers long and 1-kilometer across at its widest point. The Pennsylvania Chemicals Project includes the ethylene cracker unit (ECU) with seven furnaces and three polyethylene manufacturing units producing high- and low-linear density polyethylene. The process is driven by the power co-generation unit consisting of the three 250-megawatt gas-fired turbines. The project’s scale is impressive with 300 miles of pipe, more than 1,600 items of manufactured equipment (the larg- est lift – 1,400 metric tons), and 294 pre-assembled modules. The organization will employ 6,500 workers at the peak of construction in 2019 – 2020. The plant will support 600 full-time permanent jobs when it is operational. Finding a Solution To manage a project of this size, the project team knew it needed to conduct aerial surveys of the site to capture ac- curate data in real time. The organization awarded Eye-bot Aerial Solutions a multiyear contract to provide unmanned aerial survey services. The commercial drone services provider used Bentley’s ContextCapture to generate 2D ortho- photos and 3D reality meshes on a weekly basis using aerial photos of the site. The company also produced 2D and 3D deliverables of the staging areas and laydown yards. Eye-bot faced several challenges performing the aerial surveys, including capturing the data while workers are on- site, negotiating the varying heights of more than 120 cranes (one of them 695 feet tall), and dealing with the often Shell Polymers Utilizes Drone Technology to Capture Real-time Data on a Large Ethane Cracking Plant Bentley’s ContextCapture Processes More than 8,000 Images into an Orthophoto and 3D Reality Mesh Bentley | www.bentley.com
cold and unpredictable weather in western Penn- sylvania. Moreover, when the data is captured the team has less than 48 hours to process 8,000-plus images into an orthophoto and 3D reality mesh. High-speed Processing Engines Create an Ac- curate Reality Mesh
To keep the project on schedule, Eye-bot utilizes ContextCapture Center, which supports parallel processing using multiple high-powered comput- ers. The high-speed processing engines produce a dimensionally accurate 3D reality mesh and digital twins, which enables the team to identify and resolve the root cause of construction clashes. The software application is an integral part of the The project team took more than 8,000 aerial photographs weekly and processed them as 2D and 3D deliverables within a 48-hour window using ContextCapture.
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may 2020
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