Earthworks Processor Alternative Use Cases – Mapping Borehole Information

Earthworks Processor is a great tool in the CTC CIM Project suite for automating hours of surface creation and manipulation for the purpose of calculating dynamic and accurate earthworks quantities. With the use of a finished grade surface, existing grade surface, and simple closed polyline “regions”, Earthworks Processor will create 6 different surfaces including a stripping surface, earthworks volumes surface, and a subgrade surface. As well as offer bound volume outputs in the form of tables and labels.  

Today I want to talk about an alternative use for EWP. A dynamic way to calculate volumes and map profiles of points of interest from borehole data. This data could be anything from tops or bottoms of contaminant plumes to bedrock mapping, to volumes of loam that cannot be used for backfill. Borehole data of such points of interest is generally represented in depths from the existing surface, not elevations, and it can be tedious to get correct elevations mapped out.  

EWP only requires the existing surface and some closed regions identifying depths of the unsuitable backfill (in this case). I have mapped this out as depth contours in the capture below. 

These depth contours are derived from the borehole data, but without manually calculating, there is no efficient way to turn these depths into true elevations.

EWP can take these depths and run them through its processing to produce surfaces relative to the varying elevations of the existing surface as well as get you accurate volumes that will be dynamically updated as new borehole information is added to the design. In this scenario it’s the polyline region with the depth of 0 (or the extents of the unsuitable fill) that will give us the volume of unsuitable fill that we are looking for.

This whole process from mapped estimated depth contour polylines to dynamic volumes and surfaces is about 5 mins. The power and ROI of EWP is even more apparent when additional borehole information is added. Depth contours are modified, and EWP is rerun, and surfaces and volumes are updated in seconds.

I would like to acknowledge Jae Kwon, another Civil Technical Consultant on our SolidCAD team for this alternative EWP workflow. I hope this blog post earned your time today and helps you save time on future projects as well.