You can use ControlDraw to :

Draw Simple Piping and Instrument Diagrams

Derive Lists of

All the equipment on the diagrams

All the process materials

The Control System Inputs and Outputs

Making P&ID type diagrams with ControlDraw.

From a blank diagram, right click and select Start new Diagram, Process Flow

You can then drag symbols from the palette to the diagram, and connect them.

Set the palette to ‘Select by diagram type’ Process Flow

One point to understand is that the palette does not contain all the pictures that you can use in a diagram. However it does provide a number of examples of equipment symbols that you can put in a diagram then change to be the one that you want. Most typically this involves changing the picture.

To change the picture for a symbol, click the symbol then select the Picture button in the Symbol Controls. Make sure to deselect embedded then you can select from the hundreds of pictures that come with ControlDraw but are not yet stored in the model. Another way is to copy the image from whereever and then use Paste Special as picture

Full P&ID's are schematic drawings, typically done with AutoCAD, showing equipment, instrumentation, piping, valves and other components and associated information incudling that required for construction, operation and maintenance.

It is often asked by ControlDraw users whether they can import from their existing P&IDs.

This is not directly possible but the P&ID is still very useful and can be deployed in a model:

You can paste the P&ID into the diagram background, again using Paste Special

To do this you need to get a copy of the P&ID as for example a JPG, or PDF, then Copy it into the Windows Clipboard.

(You can also set the diagram background file name in the Page details provided it is JPG, BMP or GIF )

Then overlay the instruments (Control Modules) of the diagram before moving them to the relevant equipment modules.(or still better first Cloning them then making the EM versions the clone masters)

The cloning method allows you to keep the original P&ID whilst also having the Equipment Modules containing the control modules.

Furthermore, if you can get a list from the P&ID database of the instruments then you can use paste special to import those.

With Paste Special can also import a complete set of diagrams containing symbols and child pages from a simple list.

You can set the tagnames, classes, pictures, positions and sizes of the symbols, and you cab set child page links too.

The data must be in a defined format, this is provided with examples in the excel file ImportSamples.xls included in the ControlDraw Samples folder.