Weld tutorial

In the offshore industry, classifications and clients demand welding traceability for rigs and ships.

The life cycle of weld data goes something like this:

• Designers finish the details for an area.

• Weld identifiers and basic properties are created based on the design data.

• Inspections are planned according to class demand and the weld data.

• The area goes into construction, where the welds are implemented according to the data.

• When a welder makes the weld, they store more weld data, such as the welder, used materials, and inspections.

Often offshore companies already have an in-house weld database for managing weld data. However, it can be very difficult and time consuming to create all the weld data correctly based on 2D drawings. It is also difficult to find the locations of welds inside the complex structures with plain 2D drawings and textual information from the weld database.

CADMATIC implements the tools for creating welds in the engineering phase on top of the 3D design model and for inspecting weld data with an easy-to-use 3D review tool. With the tool, you can accomplish the following:

• Create welds with generated unique IDs in CADMATIC Hull and Plant Modeller.

• Configure the weld attributes to suit your company's needs.

• Automatically compute certain weld properties, like the weld path length and material thickness, from the 3D geometry.

• Make special weld drawings effectively using automatic weld drawing generation and weld labeling.

• Export weld data to Excel books and, from there, import the data into almost any weld database program.

• Publish welds from the 3D design model into eShare or eBrowser and enable access to weld data for anyone who needs the information.

In the current version, the CADMATIC applications support managing hull part – hull part welds and hull part – outfitting part welds.

The process with CADMATIC tools looks like this:

In the following chapters, you learn how to use the weld management in Plant Modeller via a case example.