Many of you may not know that our company began life as a Revit content creation service. Previously under the Andekan brand through to today as Kinship, our team has spent more than 13 years creating top-quality Revit content. Our clients have ranged from consulting engineering firms and architects to owners/operators to product manufacturers themselves.

Vertiv

One of our longest-standing clients that always continue to lead their sector in ingenuity is Vertiv. The company, which previously operated as Emerson Network Power and includes product brands such as Liebert and NetSure, specializes in power and thermal management across multiple industries including retail, education and government.

Coolant Distribution Units

In this post, we're showcasing Vertiv's XDU coolant distribution units. These units are used in data centers to provide effective separation of the facility circuit and secondary circuit via a high efficiency heat exchanger with the devices to be cooled.

Even though Vertiv made the XDU for this project in two sizes (450 & 1350), we made the choice early on to split these up into further Revit families because of the 450 unit's large number of available options. These include manifolds, automatic transfer switches, pipe connection configurations, tie down and various combinations of these.

Every content creator faces questions of when and how to split Revit families, of which options will be type-based and which will be instance-based. How to make these choices is a topic deserving of its own blog post, and there are also situations where it's not a clear cut decision.

For this particular project, we could have made a single 450 XDU Revit family that had a bunch of options or a ton of types. But it would have been 2MB in file size, and a "super family" like that just doesn't facilitate a fast workflow. We decided it was better to split this into four more user-friendly families all under 1MB.

We created five Revit families in total to cover the Vertiv XDU coolant distribution unit, and these generally have their types defined by nominal output and voltage. The families with the manifold have more types to allow for different connection heights depending on which valves, if any, have been used on the secondary manifold connection.

The XDU 450 has instance-based options to accommodate top or bottom entry for power, controls, primary pipe and secondary pipe connections. These can be changed easily and quickly to adapt to different requirements for MEP design and coordination.

The XDU Revit families have three levels of detail in 3D and 2D to provide appropriate views at different scales. The use of 2D geometry in plan view and elevations facilitates a fast workflow for the end user.

We build our Revit models with a high degree of flexibility to ensure they are reasonably future proof and can be easily adapted to meet varying project requirements. A lot of work goes into this, which will never be seen by the end user, but which they can take advantage of when required to easily update the family. This allows our clients to benefit from extended use of their content and reduced lifetime costs.

In terms of data, our Revit families contain all of the mechanical and electrical parameters and other information that can possibly be added for use in Revit systems. We also pay close attention to materials and material assets to ensure realistic visualizations in Revit's Fine level of detail and renderings. All of this means that the same Revit family can be used from design stage through to construction as well as in mockup images for the client.

Need Content?

If you company is looking for quality Revit content at an affordable price, give us a shout at hello@kinship.io and we'll be happy to provide a free, no obligation quote for your needs.