Hello All,
I'm currently working for a company that designs and builds control/technical equipment enclosures. We are making the switch from AutoCAD/AutoCAD Electrical to SolidWorks and SolidWorks Electrical Schematics. I'm working on the development of the software for our company use and we have run into an issue. We are trying to create panel schedules in a more streamlined fashion, and we are running into a wall. I've attached an image of an example AC panel schedule that we currently display on our drawings. We would like to do origin destination arrows and have the schedule be intelligent, and modifiable. Is there an efficient way of doing this?
Main Question: Does anyone know of a good way to do power panel schedules in Electrical Schematics?
Thanks.
We currently don't do our facilities panels in solidworks electrical, but we do our control panels in them for our machines. I can think of about 4 different approaches you could use to do this, but they are all a bit dependant on what you are trying to get out of this.
The most elegant solution would probably be to create a highly customized report. That would take a ton of work and not look exactly like what you have shown there. The advantage of the report would be you just draw your schematics, click the run report button, and it would spit out something like this based off of how you have made your drawings. Your VAR might be willing to write this report for you if you pay them to.
An easier way that graphically could be made to look identical to what you've got there would to be to create a connection labels. One for the header that would pull a bit of info from the breaker panel, and then one for each individual breaker, and you place them individually on the page in the order that you want your panel to be built. They will pull data from the individual breakers and can show show cross references to the schematic page where the breaker is placed.
If you really want to show the wires leaving this page, instead of doing connection labels, you could create symbols out the different portions and directly connect the wires to them.
Another option that would have to include one the other 3 methods would be to treat the panel as a PLC. The advantage here is you get a lot more attributes you can fill in compared to standard components. Each individual circuit gets its own description fields that are easy to see it all in one place in the PLC manager. Probably not much of an advantage to this, because you would really have to create a bunch of modules for each circuit breaker so that you could track part numbers properly.