Hi there,
I am working for a company that builds large skid based units, and traditionally all 'design' has been sent outside the company to a consultant. My boss is looking at bringing more of the design back in house at the moment, so we are utilising Caesar for the piping analysis.
My question is - what can other users recommend as a structural package that will tie nicely with Caesar?
There are 2 requirements here - one to do the design checks (ASIC / BS5950) and one to pass the loads through the structure and eventually give us foundation loads. The second Caesar handles OK the first is a bit more dubious.
Obviously hand exporting every restraint load from every operating load case to every support in a strucural model is a long and tedious process.
I have had some success using the Caesar structural modeller - but being in the UK we rarely use ASIC sections, but sometimes use ASIC rules or BS5950 the UK equivalent.
All thoughts and recommendations would be gratefully recieved as well as any comments on using Cadpipe with Caesar.

If you want a coordinated structural + piping model, then Caesar is your only option other than moving over to the competition. eg Staad + adlpipe (?). My preference would be Caesar. The automatic node numbering in Staad is a real pain when it comes to modifying and rerunning models. The Caesar steel modeller uses user defined nodes which I find much more manageable. esp. If you plan your nodes for incrementing. I would guess it would be easier to write a spreadsheet to check loading against BS5950 rather than purchase and learn 2 new packages. I haven't used Staad and ADL pipe together. They probably have there own advantages. I would suspect staad + adlpipe would come into there own integrating pipe into very large steel models using many hundreds of steel elements for seismic calcs.