Deepu Sebastian, technical product manager at GE Power in Switzerland, says that when designing new power plant projects, the process is significantly improved by the use of virtual reality (VR).
“Our engineers’ ability to immerse themselves and explore and interact with the design at a 1:1 scale enables them to come up with more-imaginative designs and better communicate ideas to potential customers.
“Furthermore, our design methodology typically involves multiple teams of 8-10 engineers, each working on different components of a power plant.
“Discovering during construction that some components don’t quite fit together is expensive, but with VR technology, our design engineers are now fixing errors before construction, when costs are insignificant — and they are better able to consider issues like servicing and maintenance.”
Mr Sebastian says that the ActiveWall 3-D VR display system from Virtalis (
www.virtalis.com) provides the best environment for team working. It uses active stereo technology and features a custom screen, specialist computer, Virtalis custom software and powerful projectors. GE Power is using a ‘blended’ four-projector ActiveWall with a 6 x 2.4m screen, plus an ART tracking system.
“We need to be able to navigate around the model and manipulate it; and with the recent addition of Visionary Render, we can work on multiple VR models, make comparisons and implement changes in VR that allow us to challenge and improve our original CAD data-sets. In fact, I suspect that we have barely scratched the surface of the software’s capabilities so far.”