CAD Senior Systems Administrator James Osborn with ALS-U models. Credit: Robinson Kuntz

The Engineering Division’s Computer-Aided Design (CAD) Department manages an enormous amount of data, with users at the Lab generating millions of CAD objects, in addition to other documentation like technical notes, work instructions, and more. In January 2025, the CAD Department, in conjunction with the Advanced Light Source Upgrade (ALS-U) Project, launched the Lab-wide Model Quality Initiative, a comprehensive program to ensure that every single object created is of high quality and follows best practices. The timing of this initiative is critical for the ALS-U Project, as it strives to complete its Final Design for the new storage ring effort within the next 12 months, and fabrication is currently in full swing. In addition, the complexity and size of the integrated ALS-U models necessitate enforcing strict CAD standards. Beyond the initial needs of ALS-U, the broader goal of this initiative is to establish and maintain a high standard for engineering data across our projects and programs.

“A big thing that I try to tell people is, we need to use this data for the next 20 years or so. It’s not something that is short-term,” explains Jacob Arnold, a Senior Systems Administrator in the CAD Department. “Five years or 10 years from now, the number of people that will have looked at the data, or used the data, or worked on the data, will be a lot. So, having better quality data for handing over from one user to the next is really important. Another thing that we have to think about is just the process of configuration and change management. The cleaner the data, the higher the quality of the data, the easier it is to track changes and make sure that everyone is on the same page.”

In support of this campaign, the CAD team has implemented more rigorous checks and guidance, provided ongoing training and training resources, instituted user forums, and supplied metrics to users, all in support of improving data and model quality. In May 2025, the team applied a strict validation requirement on models, requiring them to pass a health check prior to being released via a Promotion Request to the centralized Document Control Center system. The goal is for all data generated at the Lab to meet the established standards for usability and quality, ensuring that this valuable information is accessible throughout its scientific lifetime. So far, the impact has been clear. There were nearly 600 errors in mid-January 2025. By mid-June, this had fallen to around 200, with the trend continuing to angle downward, thanks to the diligence of the user community.

In October of 2024, the CAD Department expanded the remit of two team members, Bill Holmquist and Gordon Lyall, seasoned experts in ANSI & ISO standards adherence, who had been focusing on the ALS-U. Both are now working to validate drawings on a Lab-wide level to help ensure that they meet Berkeley Lab standards, housed via Windchill at Libraries -> Standards -> Documents. There users can access both the LBNL Engineering Drawing Standard as well as the LBNL Engineering Modeling Standards documents (on-site or VPN access is required to access links). 

These standards are especially important at an institution such as Berkeley Lab, where there is a diverse set of users, with a large spread of skill and experience levels, as well as numerous national and international collaborations working with the Lab’s data. Enforcing a standard across all users helps ensure consistency and accuracy of all Lab drawings. This also helps reduce costs, by ensuring that the drawings vendors are working off have the necessary specifications and tolerances for the job. Catching concerns like design ambiguity early in the process can save significant time and cost for components before being manufactured. 

Another prong of the Initiative focuses on shrinkwraps and envelopes. A Shrinkwrap model depicts a part as a collection of surfaces that represent the exterior shape of a source model. You can use a part or an assembly as the source model for a Shrinkwrap. These simplified models can reduce disk and memory usage by more than 90 percent.

For instance, nearly the entire ALS ring has been reproduced via shrinkwraps in order to gain a big-picture view and understand precisely how everything will fit and work together in the physical environment. To take this model for a spin, load the ALS-U General Assembly [ GA ] AL-1001-4928_VNDR model either directly in Creo Parametric, or for an even quicker experience, Creo View (Windows users only). These models can be extremely helpful in visualizing large sections of the system; however, they require significant server processing time, taking days to produce. To aid with these models, CAD has created a custom shrinkwrap publishing server, greatly reducing the amount of time required to produce them, shifting processing time away from user workstations onto our publishing infrastructure. There is also a mechanism to trigger updates to the shrinkwrap representations when anything changes at lower levels. 

Envelopes are another useful tool, which give users the ability to have a simplified view of detailed components. The team is also working on enabling Envelope functionality in Creo Parametric, which will leverage the shrinkwrap models, giving the ability to flip between high-level shrinkwraps and detailed views very efficiently.

In addition to committing to raising our model quality adherence, the CAD team has also built a new reporting dashboard leveraging the open-source analysis tool MetaBase via wcreports.lbl.gov, providing projects and their users with data to track progress on the project. These new metrics provide much-needed capability to track design maturity across the technical engineering groups within projects. The tool also provides users with a system-wide view, including how many objects have been released and how many are under change management control. This was born out of the need to understand how the ALS-U was advancing against benchmarks and goals. 

“The Model Quality Initiative is a big push for the CAD team,” says Samantha Gholba, Head of the CAD Department. “Producing models of high quality is an important endeavor to ensure accuracy of BOMs, model fidelity, high performance assembly generation, and accurate interpretation of expected delivery of our manufactured components. Caring about this process helps everyone win long-term. We’re committed to providing help, training, and guidance to ensure success for our partners.”

For more information about CAD support, visit the Engineering CAD Service Catalog or contact cad@lbl.gov.