I plan to use these in some upcoming videos to illustrate how the symbols from the lead sheets are applied to a real drawing and then compare that drawing to actual pictures of real-world plants. The last three drawings in the download link include some fairly typical P&IDs. Therefore, it is good to know where the lead sheets are in your company so you can quickly track down the meaning of that pipe service label or some other obscure symbol. For that last 10%?, there can be distinct differences and company-specific conventions used that are not obvious on P&IDs. If you compare lead sheets from a few dozen companies, you will find that 90% of them are pretty much Copy | Paste. If you've never encountered lead sheets before, for now, just know that lead sheets are used to define the equipment and device symbols, tags and other notations, abbreviations and sometimes esoteric conventions that companies use to develop P&IDs for any project they execute. We will talk more about the lead sheets (sometimes referred to as legend sheets) in Part 3 - Symbology.

If you haven't downloaded it yet, please do so now. At the end of Part 1, I provided a link to some example drawings that I put together to help illustrate some of the concepts I plan to discuss in this series.

It's important to know the limitations of a tool so that you don't apply it in the wrong way. Afterwards, we'll cover some of their limitations. We still have a bit of the academic stuff to cover before we really dig in but it's important stuff so sit up straight and pay attention! Let's kick things off by defining what P&IDs are and the types of information they illustrate.

Things are starting to heat up and soon we will be weeding out the true process engineers from the causal posers who would rather go off and waste time browsing reddit or digg (which I never do by the way). I'm glad to see I sold you on that point and welcome you back to part two of this saga.

In Part 1 of this series, I talked about why a solid understanding of P&ID interpretation is important to virtually every discipline involved in a process plant - from process engineering and detail design through construction, commissioning/start-up, operations and management. With a Bit of Smoke, a Few Mirrors and a Degree in Hieroglyphics, Anyone Can Learn to Read a P&ID.

Piping isometric drawing reading pdf