Drafting the Hydrotechnical facilities and systems
Sewage and River profiles
What are the Hydrotechnical facilities and systems?
They belong to a branch of Civil Engineering called Hydro-engineering. As the name says, these objects are built on water or are used to control water.
For centuries humans have fought with flooding rivers, huge rainfalls, and all kinds of storms.
As the technology progressed, so did the anti-flooding system, and with that, we managed to control huge rivers, to move water from one place to another place, and we started to use that water for the production of electricity.
Canals, sewage, water supply systems, dams, and embankments are just examples of this huge system.
So far, I have had experience with Sewage System and Regulating the river profile, and today we are going to talk about that and how AutoCAD helped me with drafting these objects.
Regulating the river profiles means that you have to change the river’s profile, which includes the building of embankment and strengthening the bottom of the river and the river bank.
Embankments are usually built from excavated earth, and they are sometimes strengthened with concrete or huge rocks.
Their role is to stop floodings when the water levels in the river get too high. Strengthening the river bottom and its banks is done to prevent changing of the river profile due to erosion, and it can be done by making concrete walls on river banks and by putting rocks on the bottom of the river.
In some cases it is enough to put rocks on the river banks, that depends on the speed of the river and its flow.
My job was to draft the new regulated river profiles, plan, longitudinal section, and details. I was provided with the necessary information, the speed of the river, the flow, and the natural profile of the river, and you can see my projects on the portfolio page.
With this information, we could calculate the dimensions of the new river profile and what materials to use for the river floor and walls, concrete, or rocks. We can also calculate what shape will be used for the new profile, trapezoidal, or rectangular.
In some cases, if the flow is not too big, you don’t have to strengthen the river bed. Now that you have all the dimensions and material, you can start drafting the new river profile.
You are provided with the river’s natural profile, which was measured with sonars, as an AutoCAD drawing. You use that file as a starting point for drafting because you already have the river’s natural profile, and you can start drawing a new profile over it.
That means that you can have the old and new profile in the same drawing, the natural riverbed is in one layer, and the new riverbed is in another layer. This helps you to see how is the new riverbed positioned regarding the natural riverbed.
Now that you can see everything in one drawing, you can measure how much dirt will have to be excavated and how much of that dirt can be used for new embankments.
This is done by using the Area command in AutoCAD, it helps you to measure the surface of the selected area fast. This is very helpful when you have to measure something like this in a large number of profiles because, in these kinds of projects, the more profiles you have, the better precision of building the new riverbed is.
We have the same situation with a plan, and with the longitudinal profile, you are provided with the plan and longitudinal profile of the natural riverbed, and you have to draw the new riverbed over it.
AutoCAD helps you draw this fast and precise, and it helps you measure the necessary surfaces very fast with the Area command.
When drawing the sewer pipes, AutoCAD can help you with that. We had a project where the old pipes had to be replaced with the new ones, and our job was to draw them.
We were provided with diameters, lengths, and slopes of the pipes on each position along the sewage. When you have projects like these, you have to draw a lot of cross-sections.
The plan and the longitudinal profile are large because the sewage is a little shorter than 600 meters, and you have to show it all in one drawing, that why AutoCAD is great for this job.
When drawing the longitudinal profile, you start from one side and using the Polyline command. You draw the bottom of the pipe by following the information you were provided with, like the position of the pipe in regards to the height of the ground her length.
That is how you can draw the bottom of the pipe, and when you finish it, you can use the Offset command to create the top of the pipe. The offset distance is, of course, the diameter of the given pipe. In cross-sections, you see the pipe, in most situations, as a circle or any other shape that was chosen for that sewer.
Here you draw the ground, and you show its height and the pipe with the mark that shows its height of bottom and top. Now that you have all of this drafted, you can see the entire length of the sewage’s longitudinal profile with its slopes, diameters, heights, and other necessary information for your pipes shown in the right scale.
This is just a brief explanation of how longitudinal and cross-sections for sewage and river profiles look like and how they are drafted in AutoCAD software. In one of our future blogs, we will write on this subject in more detail.
