Canada’s nuclear expert

Candu Energy Inc. is a member of the SNC-Lavalin Group. It acquired the commercial operations of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL) in 2011. The company is a leading, full-service nuclear technology company providing CANDU® nuclear power reactors and nuclear products and services to customers worldwide.

CANDU reactors are in service in Argentina, Romania, China, Korea and Canada. In Canada, CANDU reactors supply approximately 50 percent of Ontario’s electricity and 16 percent of Canada’s overall electricity requirements. Candu not only delivers CANDU reactors, but they also provide plant life management programs and tools, and offer operation and maintenance services to existing nuclear power stations.

Life extension design with Solid Edge

Candu began its life extension design activities using Solid Edge® software from product lifecycle management (PLM) specialist Siemens Digital Industries Software. CANDU reactors can operate economically and reliably for up to 60 years, with an outage at midlife to replace fuel channels. This life extension outage allows for repair or replacement of other key reactor components to improve reliability and safety. Using the Insight™ design data management solution from Siemens Digital Industries Software proved to be more than adequate until Candu started working with more suppliers and a partner, neither of which used Solid Edge for their designs.

Multi-CAD package support

Candu’s engineers and designers soon realized that it was a multi-CAD (computer-aided design) world and their suppliers and partners used various CAD applications, not just Solid Edge. So Candu had to be able to support all the other CAD products. “Our vendors and partners use various CAD packages” says Eli Fayzenberg, computer-aided application specialist. “You need to handle whatever makes sense for the business. That is why we decided to take advantage of Teamcenter®, also from Siemens Digital Industries Software, because of its ability to manage more than one CAD system on the same platform.”

Candu uses the Teamcenter® software integrations for Solid Edge® and SolidWorks® software, which accounts for all of the CAD systems currently being used by its suppliers and partners. By using Teamcenter, Candu does not have to worry about which CAD product a supplier or partner is using; all that is necessary is to obtain the Teamcenter integration for the particular CAD application being used.

Finding and sharing design data – an important consideration

Another major motivation for selecting Teamcenter was configuration control. Candu had an efficient in-house file management system to control all of its documents. What the company needed was a similar system that would manage its CAD design files. Fayzenberg explains, “We wanted to be able to go to one vault and retrieve the official ‘one-and-only’ file for a particular design. For Solid Edge, we used Siemens Digital Industries Software’s Insight solution, which utilizes Microsoft SharePoint technology. But as we were introduced to SolidWorks files, we needed something more sophisticated than design team-based PDM to handle multiple CAD design files. So configuration control is another major reason why we chose Teamcenter.”