His specialty is electrical, so I asked if he was interested in contributing a post to the BIM Chapters blog and he responded positively with this... enjoy!
Fabio Sato
Electrical engineer, graduated in Brazil, working at Filippon Engenharia as BIM manager since 2013 and as independent BIM consultant since 2017.
For more information check https://www.linkedin.com/in/fabio-itiro-sato-14564016/
How to Create Flexible Conduits in Revit
Different from ducts and pipes, there is no flex conduits in Revit. As anything in life, there are positive and negative aspects because of it.Keep reading to learn more...
To create flexible conduits, you should use Conduits without fittings, which, despite its name, is composed by conduit straight segments and conduit fittings, which you need to setup in the type properties routing preferences. Elbows, tees, crosses, transitions and unions maybe necessary to create the conduits.
The conduits routing created with this category will generate a related element, which is a Conduit Run, which aggregates the conduits segments and the elbow conduit fittings that are connected together, this element will have a length value that corresponds to the sum of the length of the straight segments and the elbow's arc lengths, making it easier to quantify the flexible conduits, otherwise, it would be necessary not only to merge information from two schedules, conduits and conduit fittings, but also generate the bends arc lengths values for the sum, this feature could be achieved by editing the bend families, but it is not necessary.
On the other hand, it will be necessary to exclude the conduit straights and fittings from their schedules to avoid double counting them. To make this task easier, a proper naming strategy may make the filtering process much simpler.
One thing that I particularly like, is that this way, routing is much simpler and faster than using flex pipes for example, especially in 3D views. The other thing that I like and its very important in my point of view, is to have control over the minimum bend radius of the conduit.
Another important point to be aware of when you create the conduit run schedule, is to know which information or parameter values are connected between them and conduit segments and fittings that are part of each conduit run segment. Conduit Runs have a limited number of standard parameters and most of them are the same from the Conduit segments, like Family name, Type name, Inside Diameter, Outside Diameter, Diameter (Trade Size) and Comments. Between Conduit Runs and Conduit Fittings, they only share Comments.
If, in the schedules you are using Description as main information, you can copy the value from Description parameter to Comments parameter in the Conduit segments and fittings and use this parameter as description for the Conduit Runs. It is very important to notice that you MUST fill the same values to all elements that compose a Conduit Run to have the information in the schedule. Of course, to automatically populate this information, you can use Dynamo to improve the workflow.
In the following images you can check the schedules before and after filling the data.
I am sharing a Dynamo graph to copy the Description parameter value to Comments parameter, but it requires the Archilab package.
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| Figure 1 - Before writing Comments data (click to enlarge) |
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| Figure 2 - After writing Comments data (click to enlarge) |
Dynamo graph link: click here to download
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