River Rock Void Ratio Confirmation

Been really busy at the moment so have not been posting as much as i like. Anyway this is a non Civil3d post that maybe of interest to some. I was designing a detention pit/chamber the other day and had no idea of what the likely void ratio of the rock material available would be. So I looked into it theoretically for spherical stones here and then once on site measured the actual void volume of some sample rock.

Sample Rock available was 40mm and above Clean River Run sourced from a local river

Test Procedure

To calculate the percentage void volume in the sample rock fill to be used in the proposed detention pit a 14litre bucket was filled with a sample of the 40mm and above Clean River Run and water was poured into the bucket to fill the voids from another bucket of known volume the percentage of voids filled with water was then calculated as follows

Round Bucket Volume

Pi(0.25)^2/4 * 0.28 = 13.7 litres

Volume of Water from Square Bucket

0.23*0.23*0.13 = 6.877 Litres

Percentage Void Ratio =6.877/13.7 =49%

Adding Additional Properties to Pipes and Structures

About a month I go I was playing around with partbuilder trying to add additional properties to pipes in my catalogue to improve our pipe labels and did not have much luck.

However Kevin posted an interesting couple of articles the other day with a link to a BeingCivil post on how to do it.

So I have revisited the problem with this new knowledge  and have been able to add a Stiffness Class as well as Material type to our PVC pipes and labels. I was able to get it to work following the Being Civil instructions with a couple of extra bits of information.

1. If you pipe catalogue is in a common network location the .xml file you adjust is in that location not on your local drive.
2. If you are in Civil3d while you are changing the xml file you will have to shut down and restart to have the new xml file loaded into Civil3d.

Use Minimum Distance between surface to get zero polyline

I keep forgetting about this tip I found one day in the forums so this is just a reminder and a link to the forum discussion.
http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/AutoCAD-Civil-3D/Trim-Surface-at-Elevation/m-p/3222202/highlight/true#M163412