Pipe Packing

You can specify the gaps between Pipes on Routing Planes, which includes Routing Planes defining Pipe Racks. This section only deals with setting values for pipe packing using the Pipe Router forms. Pipe packing can also be controlled by means of Rules, which are described in Automatic Pipe Routing Administration.

Pipe Packing Defaults

By default, Pipe Router will run pipes along Routing planes with the wall-to-wall Pipe gap given on the Pipe Router Defaults window.

• Gaps only apply to pipes on planes or racks, use obstruction volumes to model clearance of pipes from columns,

• Gaps will always be the sideways displacement: any vertical difference between the centrelines of pipes will not affect packing. Very small pipes will not be packed under the edge of very large diameter pipes.

The Pipe Gap is calculated as follows:

With a 50mm wall-to-wall gap, the centre of a branch of OD 200mm will be placed 225mm from the centre of an adjacent branch of OD 150mm.

The Pipe Router Defaults form also has a Pipe gap rounding option, which ensures that the centres of pipe are positioned at rounded coordinates relative to the edge of the routing plane. Coordinates are always rounded up. If no rounding is required, leave this value as 0. PDMS Router obtains values from the OD (for the current Pipe) or the geometry (for adjacent Pipes), and assume that these are consistent.

For example, consider two Pipes, OD 145mm and 60mm, on a plane for which the gap is 100mm. If the rounding factor is set to 10, the centre of the first Pipe will be placed at 80 (rather than 72.5). The centre-to-centre distance will be:

72.5 + 100 + 30 = 202.5

which will be rounded up to 210. Hence the centre of the second Pipe will be placed at 290:

Flanges on Routing Planes

If you need to run sections of Pipes which include Flanges along routing planes, you can specify that the gap value will be applied as a wall-to-flange (WF) gap, if the flanges can be staggered, or as a flange-to-flange (FF) gap, if the flanges are side-by-side on the plane. The default is wall-to-wall (WW) spacing. The spacing is controlled by the PLWW attribute of the RPLA. PLWW can be set to WW, WF or FF.

The Flange spacing options can be set in the following ways:

• For single routing planes

  set the options on the Create Routing Plane window when Create > Routing Plane on the Pipe Router window menu is selected. You can also change the settings for an existing routing plane on the RPLA Specification window, displayed when Modify > Routing Plane > Specification on the Pipe Router window is selected.

• For pipe racks

  set the options on the Pipe Rack Definition window, when you create a pipe rack. You can also change the settings for an existing Pipe Rack on the Modify Pipe Rack window, when Modify > Pipe Rack is selected on the Pipe Router window.

The flange width is the width of the default flange (that means, the flange which is obtained with a SELECT command) for the branches at their current bore, even if there are other flanges on the pipe rack.

Notes:

The flange width is taken as 0 if:

No rule is applied.

If you try to specify WF or FF spacing between branches either of which does not have a default flange.

If necessary you can change the spacing using the additional pipe-specific gap on the Pipe Router Defaults window.

When wall-to-flange spacing is used, the greater of the flange widths for the current pipe and the adjacent pipe will be added to the wall-to-wall spacing.

When flange-to-flange spacing is used, the flange width of both pipes will be added to the wall-to-wall gap.

The size of flanges is found using the Flange Width (FLWI) rule, which is applied to the default flange for each branch at its current bore. for further information about routing rules, refer to Automatic Pipe Routing Administration.