Engineered Efficiency fields a lot of tech support questions each day for our EE CivilAccess and EE GuidedAccess clients. Below is a common one we’ve seen quite often.

I am working on a cost estimate for several miles of waste water line.  I have my pipe networks complete and profiled in Civil 3d 2009.  I am looking for a way to determine the amount of pipe at a given size and depth.  For example I need to know how many linear feet of 54” pipe is at a flow line depth of 6-10’, 10-14’, 14-18’, etc., and continue for each pipe size.  Is there something in Civil 3d already I can use or something I can buy.

After the jump, read two possible methods that are available today in Civil 3D

Method 1:

1. Create a profile describing the flowline of each pipe.
2. Create a FL describing each pipe based on plan and profile.
3. Create a surface from this collection of feature line objects (call it flowline)
4. Create a Volume surface from the Flowline surface and the Proposed grade.
5. Set point along each alignment over each size range. I.e. Run the command with different descriptions based on the pipe size in that station range.
6. Set THOSE points ALL on the Volume surface
7. Create point groups based on the elevation and description of a pipe.
8. Count the number of pipes within a point group.

This will be the LF of pipe of that size within a given elevation range. It’s not pretty, but it will work in a pinch, and it better than doing it by hand.

Method 2:

1. In Prospector, select the Pipes collection under you Network.
2. In Item View (at bottom of Prospector) select all the rows listing the pipes in your network
3. Right-click and choose Copy to Clipboard
4. Paste into Excel
5. Use Custom Sort, sorting first by Inner Diameter and then by Max depth

This won’t give an exact answer either, since the depth ranges would apply to the entire length of pipe (between structures) but may give adequate results.

While neither of these are perfect solutions, they might tide you over until the next update of EE ProPack which should have a beta version of a more accurate tool.

Enjoy!