When it comes to planning and designing wastewater sewerage systems, the challenges faced by MEP engineers can be great in number. However, this doesn’t have to be the case. Bart van Es, Product Manager at Trimble MEP, explores six of the common challenges presented by a soil and waste system design, as well as the value that BIM software can offer, providing engineers and contractors with additional efficiencies and productivity benefits.
Whether for a hotel, office block or multi-occupancy residential building, the soil and waste pipe system design has the potential to be extremely complex, with any great number of black water pipes, soil pipe fittings, soil stack pipes and ventilation stacks required. Understandably, therefore, completing a foul drainage design can present MEP contractors with numerous challenges, not least the high levels of accuracy required and the perfect coordination of all elements.
With the rise of offsite construction methods, this need for accuracy is perhaps even more critical, with prefabricated waste systems becoming more commonly used by contractors. Without this accuracy and coordination, projects face the risk of suffering from costly delays, caused by the need for rework. Manually producing bills of materials and quantity takeoffs, detailing multiple different connectors and drain pipe fittings, and ensuring compliance to local soil pipe regulations can also all be hugely time-consuming. As such, MEP contractors and engineers need a BIM software tool that provides a solution to all of these challenges; one that is developed with the complexities of a waste water drainage system design in mind, in turn contributing to a more streamlined and efficient design and construction process.
