CAD drawing export

The CAD drawing export writes the plant as a layered drawing: the boundary, the exclusions, the tables, the equipment, the cables, the trenches and your annotations, each on a layer of its own. It is the deliverable for a drafting or engineering team — the people who will take the layout apart, dimension it, add their own details and issue construction drawings from it.

It is not a picture of the layout. The report's drawing page is that. This file is geometry a drafter can work in, at true size, with everything separable.

Beside it in the same menu sit an ICR-block drawing set, which breaks the plant into one sheet per inverter control room and is covered at the end of this page, and a cable schedule workbook. The earthing plan is a separate drawing again, written from the Earthing Design window.

Who it is for, and what they get

Anyone who only needs to look at the layout is better served by the Google Earth export or the report — neither needs CAD software.

Coordinates are real, in metres

Every coordinate in the drawing is in metres, and nothing is scaled, fitted or normalised on the way out. Which coordinates depends on how the site was located when the boundary was loaded:

The plot's units note — "UTM 42N · metres" or "Drawing coordinates · metres" — tells you which applies before you export. How the location is chosen is on A CAD drawing as the boundary.

Three consequences, all of them the point:

• The drawing is at true size. A distance measured in CAD is the distance on the ground, in metres. No drawing scale factor has to be applied or remembered.
• It overlays its source. A UTM export overlays survey data in the same zone with no fitting step; an export in the drawing's own coordinates drops straight back onto the CAD drawing it came from.
• It can be set out from. A coordinate read off a UTM drawing is a coordinate a setting-out crew can use.

The layers

Grouped below by what they belong to. The layer names are exactly as they appear in the drawing's layer list.

Site

The kept-clear ground arrives as separate layers rather than as one. OBSTACLES and WATER are treated differently on site — a building or a substation is an obstacle to be worked around, a pond is a water body with its own consequences — and OBSTRUCTIONS holds what you drew by hand rather than what the boundary file declared, so a recipient can tell the two apart. See Obstructions.

PERIMETER_ROAD is the band between the plant boundary and the usable area, and it comes across as two outline polylines with no fill — the outer edge and the inner edge. A drafter therefore receives the road reserve as boundaries to work with rather than as a solid to delete, and the same band is the one drawn on the plot and in the report. See How placement works.

Array

One layer for the whole array. Switch it off and the site, the equipment and the cabling are all still there — which is how a drafter works on anything other than the modules.

Tables are written as block references, not as individual outlines. Every table of a given size is an insert of one shared block definition, so editing that block in your CAD program updates every table in the plant at once. The block's own geometry sits on layer 0, so each insert takes the properties of the layer it is placed on, which is standard CAD practice. Tell the drafting team: a change to the table detail is one edit, not tens of thousands.

Equipment

The equipment layer name follows the inverter choice. In a central-inverter design the layer is named SMB and carries the string monitoring boxes, because the central inverters themselves sit inside the control room rather than out among the tables. See Inverter control rooms.

Keep-clear shadows

Three layers a recipient will otherwise mistake for stray hatching. Each one is the ground a structure shadows across the shadow window — and with Clear tables in shadows on, which is its shipped state, that is the ground the tables were cleared from. The shadow layers are therefore the justification for the gap in the array beside every building, object and pole. Keeping them separate means a drafter can show that justification or switch it off, and a civil engineer can see which cleared ground is shadow rather than obstruction. See Structures and shadow.

Cables

Three layers rather than one, because the three are different cables with different sizes, different burial requirements and usually different contractors. All three are written only when cable calculation was on for the run — see the conditional layers below.

Trenches

A trench and a cable are not the same length, and that is why they are on separate layers. Several cables share one trench, so trench routes are the de-duplicated routes on the ground while the cable layers carry the conductor runs. The trench layers are what a civil contractor prices and excavates. See Cable routing.

Drafting

Layers that may be absent

Most of the layers above are written on every export, whether or not they have anything in them. Three groups are conditional, and a layer that is not in the file is usually a setting you chose rather than a fault in the export.

Cable calculation and arresters are off by default, no pile pattern exists until you define one, and the overlay is off until you switch it on. So a first export, produced from a first run at the defaults, has no cable layers, no arrester layer and no pile layer — and that is correct behaviour rather than a missing export. The PILES layer draws a circle of the pile radius at every pile with its easting and northing as text; each table carries its own pattern, so half tables carry the half pattern. See Piles.

If the recipient needs cable and trench routing, tick Calculate cables on the Electrical tab and generate again before exporting. Cable calculation is the slow step on a large plant, which is why it is off to begin with — the recommended order is to review the layout first, then enable it for the final run.

Your annotations come across

Everything you drew in Sketch Mode — the lines, polylines, rectangles, circles, arcs, ellipses, splines, fills and text — is written to a CAD layer named after the Sketch Mode layer it was drawn on, in the colour you drew it in. Annotations on the starting layer, 0, land on CAD layer 0; a layer you added with ＋ in the contextual bar arrives as a CAD layer of the same name. Dimensions go to the SKETCH layer.

That is worth using, and worth telling the recipient: markup drawn on layers of its own is separable from the plant. They can switch those layers off and have the plant with none of your commentary on it, or leave them on and read what you were pointing out. Neither requires them to delete anything.

See Annotations for the drawing tools themselves.

Before you export

The ICR-block drawing set

Export ▾ ▸ Export ICR-Block DXF writes the plant as a drawing set rather than one sheet. An ICR block is one inverter control room and the tables wired to it through their inverters or string monitoring boxes — the blocks the ICR blocks row of the Layers popover colours on the plot. The item is available once inverters are placed. See ICR blocks.

The model space is the whole Export DXF drawing described above, with each block's tables and outline added on layers of their own. The paper space holds A3 landscape sheets:

• Each block sheet freezes the other blocks' layers, so a sheet shows its own block.
• The tables use CAD-safe characters: dashes become -, × becomes x, and · becomes a comma, so a transformer prints as 1 x 16,000 kVA, 4-winding.
• On a site where more than one plot has control rooms, block names carry a plot prefix such as P2-.
• The Piles row and a PILES layer appear under the same condition as in the plain export: a pattern and the overlay on.
• The arrester layer follows the Lightning arresters row of the Layers popover.

Use it when the plant is going to be built or reviewed one block at a time, with sheet 1 keeping the whole plant for orientation. The status line confirms with "ICR-block DXF exported (n block sheets + plant): …", or "DXF exported (no ICR blocks — whole plant only): …" when the plant has no blocks. The same set as a PDF is Export ICR-Block PDF.

The cable schedule

Export ▾ ▸ Export Cable Schedule (Excel) writes a workbook with one sheet per ICR block: the DC strings, the AC feeders or DC trunks, and the collection runs to the transformers and the main control room, with recommended conductor sizes and the basis they were computed on. It is not part of the drawing. What each table carries and how the sizes are chosen is on The cable schedule.

The earthing drawing

The earthing plan — earth pits, GI strip and copper earthing cable — is not in this export. Export DXF… in the Earthing Design window writes it as a separate drawing, in the layout's own coordinates, with a reference layer for the plant, a layer per strip size and duty, a layer per earthing-cable size and a layer per pit category. See Earthing design.

Limits

• It is geometry, not a drawing set. The plain export has no border, no title block, no drawing number and no revision block. Those are the recipient's, in their own template.
• Nothing is dimensioned unless you dimensioned it. The dimensions in the file are the ones you drew in Sketch Mode.
• It carries no quantities. The plain export has none, and the ICR-block set carries only its per-block tables. Take quantities from the bill of materials rather than counting entities in CAD.
• The single-line diagram is exported separately. It is not part of this file. See Exporting the diagram.

Where to go next