No more import/export to share water drainage data in a larger civil engineering model.

One of the most important acquisitions by Bentley Systems in civil engineering was the 2004 acquisition of Haestad Methods and its advanced software for wastewater and stormwater. But until now using both the products from the acquisition (SewerGEMS, SewerCAD, StormCAD, and CivilStorm) and Bentley’s OpenRoads civil engineering suite required added import/export effort, impeding workflow. Bentley has now united the two, with a new release of the wastewater and stormwater products that includes a version that runs inside version 8i of OpenRoads.

Commenting on the new releases, Chris Haines, senior civil engineer and PAR-BIM technical lead, Drainage & Utilities, Parsons, says, “The integration of Bentley’s OpenRoads civil design functionality with the advanced capabilities of Bentley’s storm and sewer analysis products will be a huge benefit to productivity and quality for our highway drainage design workflows.”

The update allows the automated hydraulic design functionality of Bentley’s sewer and storm products to become part of the 3D physical design and terrain modeling capabilities of Bentley’s other civil products. As Bentley notes in announcing the release, “this has a direct and substantial positive impact on roadway, site, and municipal work where hydraulic engineering is just one part of a much larger project.”

Key features in update include:

• Ground elevations from terrain models may be used during automated design runs to consider “cover” along a pipe’s length, improving decision making related to system design.
• Terrain model elevations can also now be added to profiles, improving the resulting visualization and the user’s understanding of the physical network.
• New low-impact development (LID) elements are now available, making it easier to model a wider range of controls for stormwater management.
• With the new lateral link element, engineers can include lateral pipes in their hydraulic analysis without creating “fake” elements where the laterals connect to the main pipe.
• Access to the Bentley Communities professional networking site is embedded within the applications, facilitating communications between users and Bentley’s hydraulic modeling experts.

In addition to support for OpenRoads V8i (SelectSeries 4), SewerGEMS, SewerCAD, StormCAD, and CivilStorm V8i also can be used with MicroStation V8i (SELECTseries 3); AutoCAD 2015 and 2016; and ArcGIS 10.2 and 10.3 (SewerGEMS only).

What do we think?

The new generation of Bentley Software, introduced last year at its annual conference, is called Connect Edition. There was a lot of talk about connecting project teams using mobile, social, and cloud technologies to achieve “information mobility.” This uniting of the former Haestad Methods software with Bentley OpenRoads may not be as glamorous as talking about civil engineering on an iPad Pro, but is an essential part of true engineering information mobility.