Project of lightning protection in nanoCAD Electro. Who said it was impossible?

The screw hammered, holds on more firmly, than the nail twisted by a screw-driver

Situation:
On the horizon, the opportunity to perform a series of lightning protection and grounding projects began to drown out, and the designer had only nanoCAD Electro at hand. What to do? Nothing wrong! Well, you can “use Excel to draw a Transformer,” but not everyone knows about it, and not everyone knows how. “Interesting, but useless,” you will say, and you will be right. However, there are indeed cases when it is reasonable and effective to use software for tasks not described in its documentation.

Lyrical digression:
There is a “designer” and sees how another tree with bananas is shaking hard, but they are not falling. Then the first one says: “Listen, you need to think: can he take a stick in his hands?”. And he answers: “What is there to think, it’s necessary to shake!”.
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The option “draw everything from scratch and count manually” is not considered.
Under the cat described the path of the second, agile, maybe even a slightly lazy designer, who is looking for optimal solutions to the problem and appreciates his personal time.

So, from the description of nanoCAD Electro it follows that the program is designed for: “automated implementation of projects in parts of power electrical equipment (EM) and internal electric lighting (EO) of industrial and civil construction objects.” Not a word about lightning protection! But often the name and description of the software product does not reflect all of its potentialities, and in our case, the designer can make life as easy as possible!

Cheating! Sheer deception!

The first thing we need is to make the program think that we are designing the electrical part of the project (and not what we want!), But at the same time getting the results we need.
Laying of conductors with different methods of fasteners, we will perform a very exotic method. The conductor needs to be hammered into the base as a "pipe", and on the basis of this pipe it is necessary to create cable-carrying systems with the appropriate fasteners. For our project, they will need three:

• Round steel for laying on the roof with manual arrangement of fasteners
• Round steel over the wall with automatic fastener counting
• Flat steel in the ground with automatic counting of fasteners

No cables will go through them, but the specification will be properly filled.
Accordingly, in the base you need to score:

• Round steel conductor
• Flat steel conductor

Just do not forget about hardware and components, we make them in the "normal" in the "materials" section:

• Dowel
• Screwless holder
• Holder support
• Cross connector for flat conductors

Ready configurations look like this:



Fasteners that should be displayed on the plan make out in the "fixtures". For them, we indicate only general data (name, description, series ...) and weight.
This is what our second "trick" looks like:



Rod lightning rods and deep earthing should be created as a “cabinet”, then the incorrectly named circuit breakers, fuses, or other elements of cabinets will serve as components for feeders. This will look like the structure of the cabinet / air terminal:



It now remains to add the conditional graphic displays to the base of the UGO, indicating the type of “luminaire” and “cabinet”, respectively:

BOM Template Setting

We continue to joke with the program settings. This time we need to force the components to fall into the group of “components and materials”, and not into “lighting equipment”. Prefabricated products should also be displayed in their section. Details on setting up templates can be found in the webinar recording (registration required) on the Nanosoft website. A ready-made specification template for lightning protection and grounding can be downloaded here .

Setting up callouts

For the final design of the drawing, you can also correct the template with automatic callouts for lightning protection elements. We are interested in elevations, elevation differences, types of gaskets and equipment names. For composite devices, you can display the name and structure of the device. The finished template can be downloaded here , and see how it is done here (registration is required).
Leaders will be updated when you make changes to the project and it may look something like this:



Or so:

Content with the fruits

After such preparatory work, you can use nanoCAD Electro tools to rivet projects of lightning protection and grounding in bundles, without thinking about the correct counting of materials and not spending a lot of time on manual drawing design. The program will even help you with this. Of course, the radii of protection of lightning, the number of ground rods and other calculations will have to do yourself. But if the calculations take up most of the time and the projects mostly come across for industrial facilities - that is, it makes sense to look at specialized applications for designing lightning protection, grounding and electromagnetic environment at the facility, for example:

• Model Studio CS Lightning Protection
• ElectriCS Storm

In the meantime, from this “more than a drawing,” we can at any moment obtain an exact specification, and export it to an office or CAD for further work:



And if you need to show a beautiful picture to the customer, or just to check the correct location of the equipment in space, you can generate a 3D model of the system with the display of all its elements.



That's all. Time is saved, peaceful sleep is assured, the building is protected!