Terrain Keeps Its Cool at Data Centre, Birmingham

Terrain Surveys were commissioned by Cadan Design to survey the cooling plant for a data centre in Birmingham. The cooling plant’s main function is to cool the banks of servers and ensure nothing overheats.

The pointcloud data supplied by Terrain was used by Cadan Design, who has previously also worked on the Meeza Data Centre in Qatar, to model the plant installation, tanks and pipework. The full colour pointcloud data was imported into Revit to enable an accurate 3D model of the plant installation together with all the pipework to be produced.

Terrain also published the pointcloud data in Leica's TruView, allowing the client to view, measure and mark up the data in a photo-realistic view. Within TruView, the data can be used to extract real 3D coordinates and accurately measure distances, as though the user were stood anywhere within the actual data centre.

Terrain Surveys Director, John Lane, explains: “The plant was scanned within a day, but it required multiple scan positions to capture sufficient data for modelling the complicated plant elements. It is great to see how our scan data, coupled with expert software, can facilitate the modelling process”.