Watch our Webinar Replay to see the Future of Pipe Stress Analysis
Currently, there are no high-performance FEA packages capable of efficiently generating the analysis model for complex piping systems.
Born out of the frustrations of the ad hoc methods available, the engineers at RMC developed an add-on to quickly generate complex piping systems inside Abaqus/CAE, the preprocessor for Abaqus.
This powerful yet easy to use system provides:
- Analysts the ability to develop geometry inside the same program where the advanced FEA work will be performed. Transferring geometry from another program can be time intensive and error prone.
- Design engineers a simplified User Interface to enable them to perform more complex analysis
The Pipe Calculation System (PCS) from RMC includes:
- Ability to generate pipe routing, bends, supports, hangers, etc.
- 3rd party file imports from most common piping software programs
- Post Processing templates for multiple ASME codes
- Access to go beyond beam models that can miss some of the real world behavior
- More accurate and efficient pipe modeling and simulation platform
Background:
The current framework for piping stress analysis is based on a simplified calculation method directly derived from experimental research performed over 60 years ago in the 1940s and 1950s. This framework was originally intended for hand calculations and, apart from minor changes and amendments, has been successfully employed by piping engineers since its development.
As computational power increases and finite element analysis (FEA) becomes more accessible to piping engineers, it has become clear that this framework is not well suited for complex FEA evaluation of piping systems. Advanced FEA procedures enable engineers to perform in-depth evaluation of piping systems that are extremely difficult or even impossible to evaluate through traditional methods.
Contrasting to traditional methods, a FEA simulation allow engineers to evaluate creep-fatigue interactions, advanced material models, complex loadings, complex geometries, complex support conditions, as well as the inherent evaluation of fatigue stress intensification factors.