By: Deborah Johnson Wood
High Definition Scanning (HDS) has been around for about a decade, but it’s just within the past few years that Grand Rapids’ Nederveld Inc. has used it to attract a new, and unexpected, clientele.
Nederveld does architectural design, construction and engineering. But HDS allowed the company to expand the surveying side of its business: owners and builders of arenas, auditoriums, and stadiums use the HDS service to determine seating capacity, distance between stairs and more. Nederveld scans cell towers so the owners know how many rods are already mounted, where they are, and if there’s room for more—all without climbing the tower.
A scanner looks like a large camera on a tripod and runs from $150,000 to $200,000. Nederveld has two: one shoots 3,000 geometric points a second, the other shoots an amazing 300,000 points per second. (A traditional two-person survey team shoots one point at a time and completes 300-400 points a day.)
The scanned information downloads to a laptop, which uses CAD software to build a 3-D model in real-time.
In the Van Andel Institute’s Phase II expansion, currently under construction, HDS verified the specs of steel framing for a massive glass curtain wall—before crews attempted installation.
“In the past, it was done manually and took three or four days,” says Clair VanderZwaag, Nederveld’s director of HDS. “HDS captured all the geometry in seven hours at a distance of 300 feet with accuracy within one-quarter inch—and we didn’t have to climb scaffolding or interrupt construction to do it.”
Other clients that use Nederveld’s HDS services include seating manufacturers, glass makers and cladding companies who need accurate specs for manufacturing and installation.
Source: Clair VanderZwaag, Nederveld, Inc.
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Deborah Johnson Wood is development news editor for Rapid Growth Media. She can be contacted at [email protected].
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