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Automated Engineering Drawing Generation for Cooling Tower Support Frames Based on Parametric Design

Author(s)

Fan Xiao1, Liangwei Zhong1,*, Yawen Fan2

Affiliation(s)

1School of Mechanical Engineering, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, China 2School of Engineering and Computing, Sino-British College, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, China *Corresponding Author

Abstract

Cooling towers are key components of industrial circulating-water systems, where heat and mass transfer between air and circulating water is employed to reduce the water temperature and thereby ensure the stable operation of industrial processes. As an important internal structural component of a cooling tower, the support structure is responsible for supporting structural members, transferring loads, and maintaining the stability of the overall arrangement. Cooling tower support structures are typically characterized by a large number of regularly arranged members, strong interdependence among dimensional parameters, and a substantial amount of repetitive work in engineering drawing preparation. Conventional manual drafting therefore suffers from low efficiency, labor-intensive dimensioning, and a high dependence on designers’ experience for ensuring drawing standardization. Moreover, existing studies on automated dimensioning have not provided a practical solution specifically for the generation and dimensioning of cooling tower engineering drawings. To address these issues, this study investigates the support structure of cooling towers and proposes a method for the automated generation of engineering drawings based on parametric design and SolidWorks API-based secondary development. First, the structural characteristics of the cooling tower support structure and its engineering drawing requirements are analyzed, and the relationships between structural parameters and drawing views, view scales, and dimension positions are established. Subsequently, a series of methods, including engineering drawing template invocation, bounding-box-based positioning, adaptive view scaling, coordinate transformation, automated dimensioning, and automatic completion of drawing information tables, are developed to enable rapid generation of engineering drawings. Finally, an application example section is reserved for subsequent validation of the proposed method using specific engineering models. The proposed approach can reduce repetitive operations in the preparation of engineering drawings for cooling tower support structures while improving drawing generation efficiency and the level of drawing standardization.

Keywords

Cooling Tower; Supporting Layer; Parametric Design; Automatic Generation of Engineering Drawing; Solidworks Secondary Development

References

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