Thanks for your responses and comments guys. This is a great forum for this type of discussion, no?

As a postscript to this, the underground part of the piping was excavated. When the soil was removed, the particular line in question did not completely 'spring back' to its installed position, which confirmed my suspicion that the pipe had gone plastic and suffered permanent deformation. So my Caesar analysis was not toally useless in that it did permit me to predict that the line had gone plastic. We decided to abandon the line on place and re-pipe that part of the process.

I learned long ago that Caesar is nothing more than a very fast calculator and is only as good as the data given it. I plan to use thgis case as a training point when training others in the use of the software. As KS Taylor said, I find my biggest obstacle in training others to do pipe stress work is to look past the program results and to remember the fundamentals of solid mechanics. The results of any pipe stress program must be interpreted through the lens of one's education in the fundamentals, through experience, and through actual field results.

Thanks again for your comments.


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Thanks,
Pete
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Thought for the day:
Good judgment comes from experience;
Experience comes from bad judgment.