The Sydney Airport Northern Reclaim project involved the creation of two new baggage reclaim carousels to cater for the larger A380 aircraft using the International Terminal T1. New plantrooms had to be constructed, and existing services diverted to allow the expanded baggage system to serve the new carousels. We were engaged to undertake all the engineering associated with the project.
During the course of our work, we learned two things worth sharing with the people scoping the Pier B North project: the point clouds are large and need management, and the process is anything but automatic!
To assist in our design coordination, Sydney Airport provided a point cloud survey of all the existing spaces which were affected – and we were asked to develop solid 3D models of the existing and proposed services.
Our 3D models were used effectively to inform the baggage designers of the available space for their conveyors and platforms. The model was used for detailed clash detection which was undertaken as part of the coordination exercise.
Our first takeaway from this project was how to best approach the gigabytes of data associated with point cloud files.
Whilst we were not aware of the process for procuring the point cloud data for the Airport, during the course of our works, we found that the supplied file was too large to be useful. In fact, it was almost unmanageable on our standard hardware. We drew on our own in-house scanning experts to divide the file into four smaller usable datasets.