Build pipe networks accurately with this guide on viewing three-dimensional pipe networks. Understand how to identify and correct network drainage issues for efficient flow to the outfall location.
Key Insights
- The article instructs in examining a pipe network in three-dimensional view, useful for identifying potential drainage issues. A network that drains below the outfall location was used as an example.
- Two corrections were recommended: rebuilding the network from the bottom to ensure hitting the outfall elevation and moving the sedimentation basin to create a sufficient fall between it and the network.
- The article also detailed the process of deleting the old network, moving the sedimentation basin, and adjusting the elevation of the feature line to match the contours of the existing terrain.
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Now that we've created our Pipe Network, we're going to go ahead and take a look at it in three-dimensional view. And when we do that, we're going to notice a little bit of a problem with our Pipe Network.
So I'm going to do that by going to our Prospector tab of our Toolspace. I'm going to go to Pipe Networks, expand out Networks, and go to our Dev Branch Storm. I'm going to go ahead and right-click on this and choose Select.
I'm going to go ahead and go to my Object Viewer. And when I bring my Object Viewer window over and I rotate this into three-dimensional space, what you're going to notice is that we have a portion of our network that works very well. It drains down to our outfall location, but we have a large portion of our network that is draining to our junction point well below our outfall location.
Now this is a two-fold problem, and we're going to have to make some corrections to make sure that our drainage solution works. And that is partially because we built from top down on one of the shortest branches of our network. When you have complex networks like this, what you want to be doing is building from the bottom up so that you can make sure that you're hitting your outfall elevation and then hitting a minimum depth on your furthest-out network point.
So moving on from there, the other issue that we have here is that if you remember Lot 6, if I select this Feature Line, the elevation of this lot is 182. And if I go to this sedimentation basin and I hover over it, what Civil 3D is going to do is tell me the elevation of a certain Surface inside of here. So I'm going to let it expand out, and what you'll see is our finished construction Surface is at 178.
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There's not enough fall between here and here to make this work, especially when we're coming out on this existing terrain with a contour that is somewhere in the 176 range. If I take this label and move it out over here, what we can see is that if we take this contour around this way and go to here, we're at 176. So any structure that we put here is going to end up being below our sedimentation basin here.
We have two things we have to do. We need to rebuild our network and we have to move our sedimentation basin. So before we rebuild our network, we're going to go ahead and move that sedimentation basin and delete out our old network.
So I'm going to go ahead and go to my Dev Branch Storm, right-click, Select. I'm going to go ahead and right-click and choose Delete. So I'm going to say Yes to confirm deletion of that Pipe Network.
And then I'm going to make the modification that I need to make to my sedimentation basin. I'm going to go ahead and take this sedimentation basin. I'm going to type M for Move.
I'm going to pick a base point inside of my infill and I'm going to move it down here. When I move it down here, what I'm going to be doing next is changing the elevation of that Feature Line. Because this Grading Group was built off of that Feature Line, all of the Grading Groups moved with me.
Now I do have an issue with my Surface. It needs to get rebuilt. If I go to Dev Combo, I go to Rebuild, then I'll need to rebuild it.
But we have one more change we need to make before we can make this change in the Surface. This Feature Line is still set to an elevation of 188 and we need to bring it down. We need to bring it down somewhere in the range of this 176 contour.
We're going to go ahead and take this. We're going to go to Elevation Editor and we're going to go ahead and bring this down by 12 feet. If I change my increment to 12 and I hit Down—well, I don't need to type a negative because I'm going down—
So I'm going to go ahead and hit 12 and then choose Down. You're going to see that I've changed my Feature Line at all points to be 176. I'm going to go ahead and check this off.
And now you can see my grading is a lot smaller here and I still have my basin. Now I'm going to go ahead and update my Surface. I'm going to right-click.
I'm going to Rebuild. I'm going to go to my Finished Construction, right-click, and Rebuild. And so when I do that now, if I click on this Surface and I go to my Object Viewer, you're going to see that my basin is now moved far off and it's sitting well below the rest of my development.
So this is good so that we can make sure that we're draining to the correct location. So I'm going to go ahead and save this drawing. And then I'll meet you in the next video where we're going to go ahead and rebuild our Pipe Network.
