GA drawings from nuclear-grade 3D models in a day, not a week
Client and context
A global water technology OEM (name withheld) supplies safety-critical intake
screening equipment to a nuclear new-build power programme. Every equipment package
must be supported by general arrangement (GA) drawings for preliminary civils:
setting-out, embedments, interfaces to the civil works. The source of truth is a
large 3D STEP model issued under the programme's document control regime.
The problem
Producing one GA package from a revised 3D model tied up the client's engineering
office for more than 40 hours per drawing set (client-reported). Every model
revision restarted the manual drafting cycle: re-measure, re-project, re-count
embedments, re-issue. On a programme where models revise often and drawing-office
capacity is scarce, the GA backlog became a schedule risk in its own right.
The approach
FaolanIQ Loki, the engineering pillar of the Faolan agent fleet, built a headless
model-to-drawing pipeline and ran it against a live drumscreen STEP model:
- STEP interrogation. The agent opens the native 3D model in headless FreeCAD,
- Automated projection. A self-calibrating projector generates plan, elevation
- Sheet composition. Views, auto-derived key data (structure envelope 16.04 m x
- CAD-native handover. The same geometry exports to DXF R2018 in the client's
- Schedules. Bill of materials and setting-out tables export to CSV for the QS
The outcome
A three-sheet A0 preliminary civils GA package, a clean DXF, and two quantity
schedules were produced end to end in a single working day, against a
client-reported baseline of 40-plus hours per set. Because the pipeline reads the
model directly, a revision re-run is measured in minutes: the drawing set and every
derived quantity update together, with nothing re-measured by hand. The pipeline has
since been productised as a reusable Faolan drawing library with built-in QA checks.
What this demonstrates
FaolanIQ agents work with native engineering data, not transcriptions of it. The
platform turned a recurring 40-hour drafting task into a repeatable, audited,
minutes-scale pipeline, on equipment where drawing quality is a nuclear-programme
compliance matter.