Is there a way to filter out the hundreds of bilinear restraints that appear in the output restraint reports (caused by sections of buried pipe)?

Not easily. How many "non-bilinear" restraints do you have?

Hi Mike,
You can filter your restraint reports if you are using 1st the ODCB-interface to excel or access to tranfer your data to one of these formats. After that you have all possibilities of filtering.
regard

Richard, I have 30 or 40 non-bilinear restraints and they are the areas of interest to me. I can't filter by node number as there are several buried sections in the model.

A filter button to remove the buried bilinear restraint type would be excellent in the next revision, as buried pipe with a lot of bends in it gives a large number of bilinear restraints in the output report.

I agree that you have an interesting situation. I'm not sure how we can filter on only one type of restraint, the next job would necessitate the filtering of something different - so to satisfy all possibilities, we would need to filter on all of the restraint types.

Actually what I was thinking is that you could CNODE all of your non-bilinear restraints to the same node, then fix that node with displacements. You could assign this CNODE easily in the Restraint List. Then, at the output level, you can set the filter to include only those restraints with CNODEs. This is do-able since you only have 30 to 40 - I wouldn't want to do this with several hundred.

In order for this to work without fouling up your plot, you need to go into the Configuration Module, and on the Geometry tab, uncheck the "checkbox" for Connect_Geometry_Thru_CNODES. If you don't do this, all of your CNODEd restraints will get squeezed to the same point. Test this idea on a small model so that you can satisfy yourself that it works.

You can number your underground pipe section out of sequence from the above ground pipe. I use something like the 9000's for the underground sections. Then all the bilinear restraints are at the end of the restraint summary and you can filter them out. The point where the pipe goes underground can use an above ground node number or an underground node number at your preference.

Even easier - renumber your support nodes of interest to be at the end of the list. You will have to cope with the global coordinates window every time unless you have a lot of loops, but this is better than driving yourself crazy picking data out of your output.

You can pretty easily write the output of interest to MS Word, copy the tables from MS Word into Excel, and post-process to the nth degree. We do this routinely in our office to check nozzle loadings, etc. You might also want to explore conditional formatting in Excel.

Richard - can you set up a future build with the capability to renumber all occurrences of one node? Does the "node name" function help with this issue? Either of these might avoid the dreaded global coordinates popup window, which you obviously need to keep active.

Craig,

Can't do this in a "build", it will have to be in an actual (version) release. I can't promise 5.10, we're getting close to wrapping that up. I'll see though ...

From the above discussion, I want to confirm, whether all the bilinear restraints of the underground piping is not required for the analysis purpose. Then what about the bilinear restraint loads at the starting / ending point bend of underground piping. I get a huge value of, say, 10 tons load at the bend point of underground piping (8” Dia) due to thermal expansion. Is this value is acceptable. What shall be the allowable load for bilinear restraint at bend point? Please clarify, if I am wrong.