Applications for the Road Design module are by no means confined to roads alone. Its functions deal with any form of terrain in sectional form, such as pipelines, canals, reservoirs, railways, airports, river channels, dams, dumps and bulk earthworks.
Up to 2500 roads can be attached to any one job. You have a choice of designing a road defined by:
Cross-sections at regular intervals - the traditional method used in previous versions of Civil Designer.
Both these methods use the same interface in terms of Horizontal, Vertical and Edge Levels specification. Both methods also use the same template and kerb files. The user can change between these two methods at any time.
The road strings method allows you to:
Design Intersections and Junctions.
Design Mini-roundabouts.
Design Stockdale Roundabouts.
Design Cul-de-sacs.
Dynamically view close-space contours on the road design.
Shade the road profile in plan.
The advantage of road strings is that they can model complicated road edges, intersections, traffic circles and cul-de-sacs far more accurately and easily than the cross-section method. It is also far easier to view close-space contours (less than 0.2m interval) of the road surface. Even 3D views of the road and intersections are simplified.
This overview allows you to easily change over to the road strings method.
How to change an existing design to strings roads
Recalculate function
Junction design (intersections, mini-roundabouts, cul-de-sacs)
The basis is that cross-sections are taken normal to an alignment of some description. The plan position of each section is defined by its 'chainage' or "station", which has a section offset of 0.000. The stations can be at regular or irregular intervals.
At each chainage, offset and elevation pairs defining various different layers can be stored. For example, a typical definition in a construction situation might be Original Ground, Final Design, This Month and Last Month. End areas and volumes can be extracted between any two of these layers.
Again, the extreme flexibility of the software must be emphasized. There are no effective restrictions as to the number of points on a cross-section, the number of chainages on a job, or the number of layers at any chainage. The number of layers at any chainage does not have to be pre-declared, nor does it have to remain constant. As you add more information, it is simply accumulated. Some, or all, of the data from one layer can be transferred to another. For instance, this Month can be moved into Last Month. Nothing has to be collected or calculated in sequence, which means a road can be built up in stages.
The data for each road is contained in two separate files. One is a binary file with the section offsets, chainage coordinates, batter slopes and so on. The other is an ASCII file that contains the design information that is pertinent to that road. Full details on the contents of this file are given in the Design File Components section.
The ultimate objective of an earthwork program is to provide a quantity of cut, fill, topsoil, grassing areas, and so on. However, this only relates to the design phase. It is still necessary to produce a bill of materials, working drawings that specify how the job is to be built, and then control the actual process of construction itself.
The Construction functions are dedicated to assisting those users who need to interact with Civil Designer in a construction environment. This includes facilities to obtain setting out information, like batter boards and layer work pole details, as well as monitoring earthwork build up. The latter is particularly important. As well as yielding over or under cut and fill data, a full statistical analysis can be obtained on the construction of multiple layers. This function is most frequently used in conjunction with spirit levelled sections.
Bearing in mind that it is beyond the scope of this software to fully cover construction requirements, the purpose of the program is to assist towards the ultimate goal as far as possible. In principle, any item of information that is stored in Civil Designer or derivable from it, must be readily available to the user in the most effective form.
See Also Road Design Procedure and Road INDEX - General.