GA drawings from nuclear-grade 3D models in a day, not a week

Client and context

A global water technology OEM (name withheld) supplies safety-critical intake screening equipment to a nuclear new-build power programme. Every equipment package must be supported by general arrangement (GA) drawings for preliminary civils: setting-out, embedments, interfaces to the civil works. The source of truth is a large 3D STEP model issued under the programme's document control regime.

The problem

Producing one GA package from a revised 3D model tied up the client's engineering office for more than 40 hours per drawing set (client-reported). Every model revision restarted the manual drafting cycle: re-measure, re-project, re-count embedments, re-issue. On a programme where models revise often and drawing-office capacity is scarce, the GA backlog became a schedule risk in its own right.

The approach

FaolanIQ Loki, the engineering pillar of the Faolan agent fleet, built a headless model-to-drawing pipeline and ran it against a live drumscreen STEP model:

• STEP interrogation. The agent opens the native 3D model in headless FreeCAD, walks the assembly tree, and inventories every solid: 587 embedded items in 23 families, counted from geometry, not from a register.
• Automated projection. A self-calibrating projector generates plan, elevation and isometric views directly from the model, with the projection basis verified against a probe body on every run.
• Sheet composition. Views, auto-derived key data (structure envelope 16.04 m x 38.34 m x 34.96 m, modelled concrete volume 8 162 m3) and a 23-line embedment schedule compose onto branded A0 sheets in the client's title-block layout.
• CAD-native handover. The same geometry exports to DXF R2018 in the client's layer standard: 3 202 entities, zero errors on CAD audit.
• Schedules. Bill of materials and setting-out tables export to CSV for the QS and site engineering teams.

The outcome

A three-sheet A0 preliminary civils GA package, a clean DXF, and two quantity schedules were produced end to end in a single working day, against a client-reported baseline of 40-plus hours per set. Because the pipeline reads the model directly, a revision re-run is measured in minutes: the drawing set and every derived quantity update together, with nothing re-measured by hand. The pipeline has since been productised as a reusable Faolan drawing library with built-in QA checks.

What this demonstrates

FaolanIQ agents work with native engineering data, not transcriptions of it. The platform turned a recurring 40-hour drafting task into a repeatable, audited, minutes-scale pipeline, on equipment where drawing quality is a nuclear-programme compliance matter.