Tip of the Month January 2000

Read Ron Haupt's " Proposed changes to Allowables in ANSI B31.1 (Power Piping code) and ASME Section III" tip of the month in our Piping Articles section.

Piping Design and Layout Objectives

Tip of the Month Febuary 2000

The purpose of piping design, layout and the supporting elements should focus on preventing the following:

1. Piping stresses under allowables,
2. Joint leakage,
3. Excessive thrusts and moments on connected equipment (such as pumps and compressors),
4. Resonance with imposed or fluid-flow induced vibrations,
5. Excessive interference with thermal movement which is otherwise adequately flexible,
6. Unintentional disengagement of piping from its supports (like a pipe shoe disengaging from a beam),
7. Excessive piping sag in piping requiring drainage slope,
8. Excessive distortion or sag of piping subject to creep under conditions of repeated thermal cycling,
9. Excessive heat flow, exposure of supports to temperature extremes outside of their design limits.

Paraphrased from B31.3-1999

How to Improve Your Efficiency Using CAEPIPE?
Part 1-Speeding up Element type input

Tip of the Month March 2000

In case you did not know, CAEPIPE is REALLY an efficient program, provided you use the different features to your advantage.

In this multi-part tip, we will cover the various features in "bitesizes." In this tip, we will look only at one aspect of Input (Layout window), keyboard shortcuts for inputting the Element types.

Several studies over the years have shown that the keyboard is still the more efficient and ergonomic method for inputting data compared to the mouse with the exception of voice technology (whenever that goes mainstream!). There are always exceptions!

For the mouse-heavy user, this discussion should be interesting

Consider the following scenario:
-Assume your fingers just typed some data through the keyboard,
-now, move your right (or left) hand to the mouse from the keyboard,
-position the mouse on the field where you need to enter more data,
-click in the field to position cursor,
-move your hand back to the keyboard,
-enter new data.

Compare the above scenario with this one:
-Assume your fingers just typed some data through the keyboard,
-now, use a keyboard shortcut to position cursor in the new field,
-enter new data.

Which one is more efficient? In most cases, it is the keyboard.

CAEPIPE has been designed with this in mind. To provide the keyboard shortcuts so that the user can zoom through input. CAEPIPE is also ready and waiting if you choose to use the mouse.

As an example, let us input a node number followed by a Bend element using the mouse and the keyboard.

Using the mouse: After typing the node number in the Node field (on the keyboard),
-move your hand from the keyboard to the mouse,
-position the mouse in the Type field (of that row) where you need to enter a Bend,
-right click in the field to open the Element types dialog,
-move the mouse pointer to Bend,
-click once on Bend (CAEPIPE puts a bend and moves the cursor to the next field, DX)

Using the keyboard: After typing the node number in the Node field (on the keyboard),
-Press TAB to move to the next field (that is the Type field),
-Type "b" and press TAB (CAEPIPE puts a bend and moves the cursor to the next field, DX)

See how efficient (and fast) keyboard shortcuts in CAEPIPE can be?

So, here is the list of keyboard shortcuts for you to try out.

B(TAB)	Bend
BEN	Bend (no TAB required, and typing BEN moves the cursor over to the DX field.)
BEA	Beam
BEL	Bellows
BA	Ball joint
C	Cut pipe (Cold spring)
E	Elastic element
F	From (starting point for the line, the beginning row must have a From)
H	Hinge joint
J	Jacketed pipe
JB	Jacketed Bend
L	Location (to insert Data at that node number, for which the node must have been defined earlier)
M	Miter Bend
P	Pipe (you don't have to type this because a Pipe is the default element type in CAEPIPE and an empty field/cell indicates a Pipe element).
R(TAB)	Reducer
RE	Reducer (no TAB required)
RI	Rigid element
S	Slip joint
V	Valve