Hi,
Has anyone experience with creating iso's from CS II models?

After a year of exploring CAESAR II it is time to make stressiso for approval of the pipestresscalculations for our NoBo.
I've tried about 30 different CS II models, but none created a proper stressiso.
Most models stopped at "error pcf file". What's that?
And if I got drawings strange bends and unexplaiable skew piping was introduced.
I expected that introducing Isogen into CAESAR II worked, but I'm very disappointed.
Helpdesk: "next version (5.10) is better". This is what all ICT-people say. First see than believe.

Has anyone good advice? What should I do or don't in creating a CS II model to make later a good stressiso with Isogen?
Greetings
Erwin
The Netherlands

The way you build an analysis model is not the same as a CAD program therein lies the difficulty so your analysis model will not always allow ISOGEN to create an ISO....

If you want ISO's use a CAD program to get 100% reliability....

I actually use those stress ISO on each job. There are bugs, which I hope are fixed in version 5.1 (Where is it?). The old system is better if you need to fit huge system on one drawing. ISOGEN make "prettier" drawings.

After you get this error open the PCF file in any text editor. You find it in the same directory where your model is. Model name.pcf. You may see the problem there.

Typical problems:
- model is too big, solution split the model
- you have activated too many annotations, solution reduce

What I normally do with large models is I annotate my model, save annotations and then copy the model to a separate directory under different names. Do not use SaveAs as this strips all annotations, calc results etc. Open each of the models and delete part of it to reduce the size.

Isogen has long lsit of settings to use. Many of them do not work on CAESAR but some critical do. Best is to start using one of the standard styles and then modify it step by step. If you keep getting those errors then reduse the model size until you id what is wrong. This way you learn as I did.

If you get funny angles then maybe your CAESAR model has lines skew.

I had a job where couple km of piping was erected using the stress ISO :-). For model checking on site brilliant. To pick up some type of modelling errors not bad.

Buggy as said but better than nothing.

Version 5.10 was released last week, so you should all be seeing it shortly (if you paid your UMS and are not using a limited-run version). Some of the Isogen items have been fixed, some we cannot fix because they are limitations within Isogen, which is not written by COADE. One problem we just encountered, and there is nothing that COADE can do about it, is when there are more than 3 parallel branches of piping running between two headers, the branches will display as skewed. We did add the ability to view restraints on intermediate bend nodes, something we didn't have before. But Isogen does not display large radius bends correctly and there is nothing COADE can do about this either. While we are working with the folks who wrote Isogen about these and other issues, it would be nice if our user base curtailed their complaining about items COADE has no control over. Jouko provided us with a lot of testing and ideas for making our interface with Isogen better (thank you!) and I think we have done that. We will continue to make any improvements on our side that we can, but it is unreasonable to expect immediate perfection.

So, how does one know what items COADE has control over and what they don't?

What we have control over is the writing of the PCF file, but not Isogen's processing of this file. The PCF file contains items of basic geometry only. We have no control over how Isogen creates the drawings, for example how it breaks a large model into several Isos. Some Caesar II files are simply too large for Isogen to handle in which case it locks up and has to be killed in Task Manager. If you can't build it in the real world then Isogen can't build the model. We have made some changes to force it to handle zero-weight rigid elements and plotting boundary conditions to intermediate bend nodes, but we can't control how it plots bends. The other problem is that of annotating the stress isos. We can annotate it, but Isogen determines where it will place that annotation on the drawing and if there is not room for it to add the annotation it will become problematic. Basically, we would like Isogen to never crash due to some limitation in its interpretation of the PCF file, which is what we are attempting to perfect so it always understands the items contained in it.

Caesar does not use Full Personal Isogen, but I-Configure, which is like a light version of Isogen, which has limited controls.

To solve the problem with the unexplainable skew lines, import the CAESAR II model into CADWorx. From there you will be able to run Full Isogen, which has full Control, the ability to override SKEY's and also create customized SKEY's via the uber unuserfriendly Symbol Editor.

Not sure what 5.1 is like. Havn't recieved ours yet.

Surely you can hardcode the correct or a customized SKEY that will show the bends correctly into the software?

As far as I know importing drops all stress ISO annotation info.