When I bury my piping model in Caesar the rigid elements in the model (valves) are split into several parts, one of which appears to be just plain pipe. Anyone know why this is? I have come across this before but can't remeber the answer.

Are these very long rigid elements?

No they're Class 600 24" ball valves approx 1400mm long

What I'm thinking is the processor that establishes the Zone 1 (closely-spaced point restraints to model transverse soil bearing) spacing is adding additional nodes through the rigid element but the new elements are not maintaining the rigid element designation. I would consider that something we should fix.

I can build my own job to check this but can you tell me what your Zone 1 spacing is? (It's Lb/3; where Lb is the calculated bearing length, it is listed as the processor "buries" the pipe.)

The zone 1 spacing is......

K = 2.83 N/mm/mm
E= 2.07E05 N/mm^2
I= 1.19E9 mm^4

===> Lb/3=3300 mm

Well, my assumptions are not working. Can you send the unburied job and your .SOI file to techsupport@coade.com and add a note to forward to Dave Diehl?

Sorry for the slow resolution to your question.

We'll have to take a closer look at what's going on here.

There seems to be an issue with burying sections that end with a rigid. That ending rigid is broken in half and only the first half remains rigid. The restraint stiffnesses seem fine and, since it's buried, I'm not worried about the weight. (CAESAR II sets rigid weight to 0.01 just so the valve still looks like the original valve.)

So, at the moment, if you have a buried section that ends with a rigid element, you will have to respecify "rigid" for the second half of that rigid element in the buried model.

Let me know if you see it differently.