AECOM is one of the world’s largest infrastructure firms, earning around US$18.2 billion in revenue during 2017. AECOM designs, builds, and operates infrastructure assets in more than 150 countries.
AECOM recently used MagiCAD software to assist with the electrical design on a hospital building project located in the UK. The project has been on-going since 2015 with completion expected in 2019. The design team, from offices in Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester, completed the MEP design (mechanical, electrical and plumbing) for the new hospital using Revit and MagiCAD.
“We’ve been using MagiCAD for around three years in various areas such as mechanical and plumbing, and most recently have used it alongside lighting design software, DIALux, to reduce the time it took to fit the 1,000 room hospital with lighting fixtures,” said Daniel Cosgrove, MEP BIM Manager, Building Services Engineering at AECOM. “We used it to complete RIBA Stage 3 — the Developed Design stage.MagiCAD integrates easily with DIALux, so we first exported all of the room geometry floor-by-floor from Revit via MagiCAD into DIALux.”
Daniel explains, “It was a simple process — with just a couple of clicks we created exports for DIALux for each of the 12 floors, performing the necessary calculations and then importing the lighting design directly into the building information model. We imported several thousand lighting fixtures back into Revit in just a few hours. In order to complete Stage 4 design, we simply needed to circuit the lights using standard Revit circuiting.”
Daniel said, “Because we used this particular MagiCAD functionality in Stage 3, it enabled us to deliver the whole lighting package six weeks early. We were initially faced with quite tight schedules for delivery on the services, and we used MagiCAD to shorten our timescales. This gave us a really good head start on the Stage 4 design.”
The team of designers made use of MagiCAD and Revit, alongside the open source tool Dynamo. Daniel explained, “we completed the entire MEP design of the building, and although we didn’t use MagiCAD in every step we did make use of the 2D engineering symbols and design parameters within the product families. We loaded all of the ductwork and pipework from the MagiCloud MEP content library to fully detail the facility.”