BricsCAD is the hub for design data at Noraqua

Noraqua, an engineering company with headquarters in Oporto, Portugal, has specialized in hydraulic engineering for over 35 years. Noraqua has proven to be a trusted and highly skilled partner for countless companies all over the world involved who carry, transport, contain or treat water. Noraqua chose BricsCAD and BricsCAD Pro permanent licences as their CAD solution.

José Duarte, a Civil Engineer at Noraqua, explains, “We are a civil engineering company that specializes in engineering services related to hydraulics. That means sewage networks, stormwater networks, pumping stations, water stations, and irrigation networks. We chose BricsCAD because it helps us move forward, to get a vision of what the plant will look like.”

VERY FAST AND VERY STABLE

Noraqua works on large DWG drawing files for airports and highways, some over 100MB in size. Historically, Duarte and his team suffered with software that was slow and frequently crashed. They needed a faster, more stable software, and BricsCAD fit their needs. BricsCAD enabled a much more efficient workflow.

“BricsCAD is very light. It’s fast and stable,” adds Duarte.
*“One of the things that we like about BricsCAD is that we can work with very large files. When we tried to make the program crash, as a test, by overloading it with files and images, it didn’t. It still worked fine. BricsCAD’s enormous compatibility with other programs has really helped us move forward.

In our line of work, we don’t need to create 3D solids, but we do work with elevations and polylines that have Z elevations. Everything is 3D for us. We don’t need to see our work in 3D, but we need all the values to create sections.”*

CONVERTING TO BRICSCAD

Duarte thinks that if people are already familiar with CAD, they can adapt easily to BricsCAD. He remarked that, after one or two days, his colleagues were able to work just as well with BricsCAD as they had with their previous software. As the days go by, they get faster, because *“BricsCAD is a faster software.” *

SHIFTING SMOOTHLY BETWEEN SIZING PROGRAMS AND DRAWINGS

“I am the one who brought in BricsCAD, and I am very happy I did,” comments Duarte. “On top of the other strengths that I mentioned, BricsCAD allows us to smoothly shift back and forth between our pipe-sizing programs and the drawings we create. If you combine that with BricsCAD’s speed of execution, at the end of the day, we are more productive by using BricsCAD than by using any other program.”