AutoCAD Electrical 2009
Published Wed 10 Dec 2008
AutoCAD Electrical offers an intelligent way of designing control systems and electrical schematics, without all the headaches.
Electrical CAD (ECAD) has traditionally been a slowly evolving application area in the world of Computer Aided Design. Many users have been reluctant to trade in their generic drawing tools to move to dedicated electrical design systems, but which could vastly improve productivity and accuracy. The most popular weapons of choice appear to be vanilla AutoCAD, or AutoCAD LT, which are great at creating lines, circles and arcs but know nothing of schematics, circuits, panel layouts or terminal strips. This is where AutoCAD Electrical is positioned, as essentially a layer of electrical, hydraulic and pneumatic knowledge, that sits on top of AutoCAD and adds in content and design automation. Working within the AutoCAD environment is probably AutoCAD Electrical’s most obvious advantage, for if you have been trained to use vanilla AutoCAD, you can easily access AutoCAD Electrical tools.
The Terminal Strip Editor offers a visual way to define terminal layout and settings, graphically, in a Table or via jumper chart.
Launched in October 2003, AutoCAD Electrical is now in its fifth release and sales are growing incredibly strongly. Autodesk purchased the original technology in 2003 from VIA Development Corporation as part of a program to expand the scope of the company’s MCAD solutions to cover all engineering activities. Autodesk’s ambitions in this area continue apace; just as we went to press on this issue, Autodesk announced that it had completed its acquisition of the ECSCAD product line from Elektro-CAE-Software GmbH (ECS). ECSCAD software is also based on AutoCAD and has a feature set which complements AutoCAD Electrical. The move can also be seen to cement Autodesk’s competitive position in the German ECAD market.
The advantage of being based on AutoCAD can’t be stressed enough, as most electrical engineers will find themselves operating software in an environment with which they are very familiar but the software will automate many of the repetitive and complex tasks. All the geometry created within AutoCAD Electrical is standard AutoCAD geometry and can be shared around a DWG ecosystem safe in the knowledge that every project participant can see all the information.
Electrical Features
AutoCAD Electrical comes with a gigantic database of drafting and library components, which conform to JIC, IEC, JIS, and GB international standards. There are more than 350,000 manufacturers’ symbols which include push buttons, selector switches, lights, relays, contacts, fuses and terminals. It’s also easy to make your own intelligent symbols from dumb AutoCAD blocks or previously created symbols libraries, using the Symbol Builder application. As AutoCAD Electrical is a multi-discipline tool, it also comes with pneumatic, hydraulic and P&ID schematic libraries – so Electrical is perhaps, in part, a misnomer.
Customers can define their own electrical symbols for use in their designs. Going beyond graphical representation, there’s plenty of potential to add in useful attribute data that can be used later on in the process.
In this latest version there are many enhancements to the interface to really speed up document navigation and access. There’s also a raft of design and draughting productivity tools that are specific to AutoCAD Electrical. The introduction of progressive tool-tips will speed up familiarity with commands for new users, with help always literally being at the end of your ‘pointer’.
Using template-based design, a new drawing can be started with a single click, with AutoCAD Electrical loading all the project settings. As schematics can span many drawings, AutoCAD Electrical fully supports the multi-document Interface (MDI) within AutoCAD, allowing cut and paste between drawings. Quick navigation tools mean project documents can be scanned through without having to open up individual files.
As the system is based on smart symbology, there are some clever tools on hand to speed up insertion, manipulation and connections. Symbol Blocks can be instantly swapped across an entire project, should the standard change or be re-used in a country that uses IEC instead of JEC. Numbering and labeling components is a highly time consuming process. AutoCAD Electrical makes this effortless. Everything added to a design gets given a sequential and unique identifier, which is then intelligently placed within the drawing. All components can be re-tagged with a single click, with great flexibility as to how these tags are formatted. It’s also possible to fix component tags so they remain unaffected during the powerful global retagging command.
The new Circuit Builder function speeds up motor control circuit design. The package comes with a list of pre-defined motors and when added to a project, automatically designs the circuit based on the horsepower and standards of the chosen motor. Wiring is dynamically generated between the components along with the correct rung spacing. This works with custom motors too, driven by changes to spreadsheet and drawing templates. These configurations can be saved and used again.
Schematics
To speed up the creation of schematics, Autodesk has added a range of Electrical-specific draughting commands. These aid productivity by speeding up alignment between symbols, intelligently trim wires, copy, paste and delete components and multiple wires can be drawn with a single command. If wires cross, the system automatically indicates which wire passes through and there are a number of choices as to how the system displays this. If wires, cables or conductors run through multiple pages of a design, it’s easy to track them, page to page, within any project. There’s also a Connection Generator, which can quickly produce connection arrays, simply by stating the number of pins and orientation.
AutoCAD Electrical has a very flexible Ladder insertion utility. This is usually a tedious process but the program allows horizontal and vertical ladders to be quickly inserted, providing complete control of the number of rungs, pacing and width, together with automatic reference numbering based on user-configurations. Modification of Ladders can be done intelligently, in-drawing, without the need to delete the whole Ladder and start again, which as you would guess would be time-consuming. For instance, new Rungs can be easily inserted into existing Ladders, complete with wire connection dots.
For Three phase work, there are specific intelligent symbols that include three-pole breakers, switches, motor contactors, and more. These symbols automatically adapt to the underlying three-phase rung spacing upon insertion, saving time and helping to improve productivity.
A visual way of selecting jumper settings.
Terminals
Terminal strips can be easily edited with reduced mouse clicks through an enhanced editor. It’s possible to create, view and edit internal and external jumpers within the editor, providing graphical or table-based feedback. Terminal strips are automatically populated with the wiring when assigned and the graphic can be added to drawings. Various terminal and wiring reports can be generated.
Panel Layout
After the schematic has been created, AutoCAD Electrical extracts the list of components ready for placement. From this list, components are selected and placed onto the panel. As each item is placed, the software links between the panel layout and the schematic. This approach means that nothing from the schematic can be left out. As edits occur during the design phase edits to either drawing will prompt the software to update the other. Autodesk has even provided for non-schematic elements to be included when it comes to producing a Bill of Materials (BOM). This process also works in the opposite direction, should the panel be defined first.
Information model
One way to look at AutoCAD Electrical is that in the production of the schematics and ultimately the set of drawings that defines the project, the system creates a very powerful information model. This model has quantities, BOMs,,all component relationships, wire lists, terminal plans, PLC I/O, cable lists etc. This information can be filtered and queried and can generate many different types of useful reports. All these benefits are a bi-product of the intelligent drawing production. AutoCAD Electrical’s reports can be included in the drawings in smart tables or saved to a file (ASCII, Excel, Access, CSV, XML), for distribution or alternative uses. The reports are ‘surfable’, having embedded links to speedily locate components in drawings. Devices and relationships between devices in a project can be quickly found and interrogated. Autodesk calls this ‘surfing’: by clicking on a component in a panel layout, the system will display the corresponding schematic device across multiple drawings.
While the software is always checking the design in real-time for errors, like duplicated wire numbers or assigning too many contacts to a relay, AutoCAD Electrical also produces Audit reports. After analysing designs for inconsistencies, any problems that are highlighted can be tackled before they get to the shop floor.
AutoCAD Electrical includes the Vault data management system, which is easy to use and links workgroups to co-ordinate development on DWG files. For more advanced release management, Autodesk’s Productsream service has been updated to integrate with AutoCAD Electrical’s ProjectManager.
With many users upgrading from AutoCAD or LT to AutoCAD Electrical, Autodesk has included a migration utility to bring existing designs, created the hard way, into intelligent drawings. There are also tools for users of competitive products such as promis•e. Also included is a powerful content database application to rationalise new, old and user-customised catalogue parts, symbols and content.
Conclusion
AutoCAD Electrical offers a very powerful suite of tools, in a very familiar environment and has tight integrations with other MSD products such as Vault, Productstream and Inventor. All these intelligent applications integrate to deliver on Autodesk’s big picture vision that engineers will move to using a ‘Digital Prototyping’ methodology to design products. This means that a digital version of the product is created, including electrical and mechanical components, where it can be tested and analysed to improve the system performance, prior to making a physical prototype.
Compared to using a plain drafting tool like AutoCAD LT, AutoCAD Electrical really is a complete ‘no-brainer’. The increases in productivity from just using one of the many features in the product, (such as the huge symbol library, automatic tagging, cable tracking, reports, error checking etc.) would save enough time to give a very quick Return On investment (ROI). In all respects, the productivity gain available from moving from vanilla CAD tools to AutoCAD Electrical is, in a word, massive. It is the same scale of benefit as we all had moving from drawing board and pencil to 2D CAD.
