The Problem
Preparing a well pad requires moving enormous volumes of dirt. The central challenge is choosing the right reference elevation: too high and you're hauling fill; too low and you're wasting cut. Even small errors compound across thousands of cubic yards.
Traditional approaches either rely on manual iteration in expensive CAD tools, require dedicated survey software licenses, or produce no meaningful optimization at all. Field engineers needed a fast, scriptable tool that could evaluate multiple design alternatives in minutes.
The Solution
Padgrade is an earthwork optimization tool that needs almost nothing to get started: a plat map or a set of geo coordinates defining the site boundary. From there, everything is automated — terrain acquisition, elevation optimization, design surface generation, and reporting. The result is a self-contained, interactive 3D HTML report that anyone can open in a browser.
Key capabilities
- Start with just a boundary — drop in a plat map or geo coordinates and the system handles the rest. No survey data required upfront — Padgrade automatically fetches 1-meter elevation data from the USGS 3DEP national dataset
- Balanced elevation optimizer — finds the cut/fill balance point using bracketed root-finding (sub-0.1 ft tolerance)
- Full design surface — buffer zones, configurable side slopes, pad cross-slopes, and pad shape simplification
- Earthwork factors — swell, shrink, and topsoil strip depth modeled per industry standards
- Interactive 3D viewer — five visualization modes in a single HTML file with no server required
- Haul distance estimation — volume-weighted centroid separation for cost estimation
The Outcome
A tool that runs in minutes on any laptop, tablet or phone, and produces results an engineer trusts. Site prep bids can be checked against an independent optimization baseline, and multiple design alternatives can be evaluated in a single sitting.
The Systems Engineering Challenge
The hard part wasn't calling SciPy's optimizer. It was modeling the physical reality: how soil behaves when excavated (swell), how it compacts when filled (shrink), how topsoil stripping removes material from both cut and fill zones, and how side slopes interact with buffer zones at the design boundary.
Getting these factors right — and building a pipeline that handles coordinate projection, terrain interpolation, polygon masking, and 3D visualization end-to-end — required engineering judgment that no amount of code generation can replace.