ADVANCES IN MULTI-SENSOR SCANNING AND VISUALIZATION OF COMPLEX PLANTS: THE UTMOST CASE OF A REACTOR BUILDING

Abstract. In a context of increased maintenance operations and workers generational renewal, a nuclear owner and operator like Electricité de France (EDF) is interested in the scaling up of tools and methods of “as-built virtual reality” for larger buildings and wider audiences. However, acquisition and sharing of as-built data on a large scale (large and complex multi-floored buildings) challenge current scientific and technical capacities.

In this paper, we first present a state of the art of scanning tools and methods for industrial plants with very complex architecture. Then, we introduce the inner characteristics of the multi-sensor scanning and visualization of the interior of the most complex building of a power plant: a nuclear reactor building. We introduce several developments that made possible a first complete survey of such a large building, from acquisition, processing and fusion of multiple data sources (3D laser scans, total-station survey, RGB panoramic, 2D floor plans, 3D CAD as-built models). In addition, we present the concepts of a smart application developed for the painless exploration of the whole dataset. The goal of this application is to help professionals, unfamiliar with the manipulation of such datasets, to take into account spatial constraints induced by the building complexity while preparing maintenance operations. Finally, we discuss the main feedbacks of this large experiment, the remaining issues for the generalization of such large scale surveys and the future technical and scientific challenges in the field of industrial “virtual reality”.