In this Feed & Grain Chat, Dan Starr, partner/owner of ScanStar, LLC, discusses scanning techniques commonly used at feed and grain facilities, like photogrammetry and LiDAR, to create point clouds and digital twins of facilities. Starr shares how digital twins can aid in facility planning, construction, and maintenance, as well as the safety and efficiency scanning techniques offer vs. manual measurement methods.
Transcription of Feed & Grain Chat with Dan Starr, owner/partner, ScanStar, LLC
Elise Schafer, editor, Feed & Grain: Hi, everyone, and welcome to Feed & Grain Chat. I'm your host Elise Schafer, editor of Feed & Grain. This edition of Feed & Grain Chat is brought to you by WATT Global Media and FeedandGrain.com. FeedandGrain.com is your source for the latest news, product and equipment information for the grain handling and feed manufacturing industries.
Today, I'm joined on Zoom by Dan Starr, Partner Owner of ScanStar LLC. He’s here to discuss the latest structural scanning technologies and how they can benefit feed or grain facility projects and optimize operations.
Hi Dan, thanks for joining me today! Let's start by talking about facility scanning techniques that are commonly used in a feed and grain facility. Can you tell me more about some?
Dan Starr, owner/partner, ScanStar, LLC: Yes, absolutely. There's a couple of different main techniques that are used in scanning. One is photogrammetry and the other is LiDAR. LIDAR can be accomplished in multiple ways. Photogrammetry is mostly accomplished by the drone. But with LiDAR, you can mount it on a drone, or mount it on a tripod. Tripod is the most common way to use LiDAR scans.
When people think about scanning a facility, they really automatically think about the point cloud, and that's most common. And that's essentially what it's used for — to create a digital twin of an existing facility or a Greenfield site if you're planning on constructing something and especially if it has varying elevations of terrain.
Schafer: Can you explain how these point clouds can benefit facility owners and their contractors throughout the life of a facility?
Starr: Once the scan is complete, and you have the digital — I'm going to use the term digital twin because it is a twin of your facility, recreated in the digital world. So, once a digital twin is created, it lives forever. And it can always be referenced for locations of items or trying to recreate a process flow. It's also used to repair damaged structures.
For instance, as well, if we were scanning the interior of a bin — an empty bin — and assessed for any type of structural damages, like cracks, holes, spalling, that kind of stuff, and shown to an engineer and an engineer can then make a plan from what he sees to repair that silo. A lot of times people use drones and take pictures and such, too, and that works well. But when you're going deep into a dark silo, it's always nice to have that 3d model, so that an engineer can assess it that way.
The term digital twin is kind of like an onion. It has many layers, so it's not just the scan that makes the digital twin. The scan is a big portion of it, but the digital twin is not just the facility information. What we do with a full digital twin is reconstruct the facility after the scan is done in a program like Revit or AutoCAD. Mostly Revit because that's the best for storing information inside objects. The model is built off of that. The scan is incorporated with that and then we use equipment and such in the model to store information in the Revit model, so that includes equipment specifications, approval drawings, process flow information, all that stuff is stored within the model. So, a digital twin is the scan, but it's also the complete informational package of your facility, so there’s more to reference in a full digital twin than just what you can see in the point cloud.
Schafer: What are the benefits of scanning technology versus having human laborers gather the data?
Starr: In this industry, I think it's really critical. I worked in this industry for 15 years before I started this company, and I was the guy pulling the tape measure, drawing the drawings, at the site, doing the sketches and everything and then flying back to wherever I was working and recreating that in the computer. And too often you do that and we're all human — everybody's going to make a mistake. 'Oh, I forgot this dimension.' Well, a lot of times, companies will have to send another guy down there. ‘Hey, we forgot to get the information on this area, and we really need it.’ And I've met people who've gone down to the sites three, four times throughout the course of the design of a project.
That and the hazards involved in our industry. There’s a lot of hazards whether it's noxious gases, dust hazards, explosion risks, things like that. So, putting people on site for an extended periods of time to measure things up always carries a lot of risk. So, if you can just scan a facility with a couple people, who, with safety in mind, can be there for a few hours or a few days, and then be out and have everything, that eliminates a lot of risk to exposing that personnel for an extended period of time to noxious gases in a boot pit.
Schafer: Thank you so much for sharing your expertise on this topic, Dan.
Starr: Absolutely. Thanks for your time, Elise
Schafer: That's all for today's Feed & Grain Chat! If you'd like to see more videos like this, subscribe to our YouTube channel, sign up for the Industry Watch Daily eNewsletter, or go to Feedandgrain.com and search for videos. Thank you again for joining, and we hope to see you next time!