This is not a nationality issue. All of us who have been in this business for a while have our own horror stories, at least a few self-inflicted.

I was talking to my boss this morning, and he told me we have a new stress analyst coming on board soon, He regretted that he had to hire one without a lot of experience.

I told him that I doubted that I was any better at using the software than I was at age 32 (longer ago than I care to discuss). He agreeed that that was probably true, but that the difference was judgment. I second that opinion.

If somebody tells you to treat something as weightless and frictionless to make your analysis easier, you should regard this in much the same way as if you were in New York City and a guy came up to you on a streeet corner and offered to sell you a $15,000 Rolex watch for $150. We stress analysis types are not usually the bearers of good news in this industry, and it takes some years before we get over the common idea that we want everybody to like us.

Breen, Luf, Superpiper, Captain Kenny, and others like myself post horror stories from time to time to try to get the point across that you have to understand the whole process involved. Stress analysis is crunching numbers, but that's not the primary goal. The primary goal is to make sure that the numbers you crunch are connected to reality. CAESAR II and other tools make crunching the numbers easy (I have done hand calcs for piping systems!), but this can be dangerous if the input is unreasonable.

Weight can always be removed from a terminal equipment connection in the real world. Sometimes it's complicated, and expensive, but there is always a way. I just spent three days designing about 15 spring supports for piping where a pump vendor was insisting that we bolt 300 pounds of valves directly onto a pump discharge nozzle that is only rated for a 240 pound vertical load. Eventually I found an arrangement of spring hangers that could support some of the weight of the valve station (but not too much) in all of the relevant load cases. It took a lot of trial and error, though.

This sort of problem is not really one where CAESAR II does a good job of selecting spring hangers as yet. I'm sure by the time version 7.0 rolls out of the back room, the folks in Houston will have this figured out, too.

But we always have to remember, CAESAR II is a tool, not an answer machine. When I was in grade school, I read a book called "Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine." It was about a kid who copied all his textbooks into a computer (back before computers were commonly available) and then had it print out his homework in a couple of minutes every night after school. The whole point of the story, though, was that he had to do the homework to get it into the machine in the first place. CAESAR II works the same way - if you want to get good information out of it, you have to understand what the effect of every input item is as you enter it into the software. That's judgment, and it's a precious commodity. Even those who don't like our answers have at least a grudging understanding that, without our efforts, projects are not going to run smoothly.

I delivered a couple of stress reports to one of our projects yesterday, and the project manager sarcastically congratulated me for getting the stress analysis done on time. I just laughed. The reason was that the designer who did the layout had come to me early in the process and we had discussed how the piping should be routed in the vicinity of the equipment to make it unlikely that there would be stress issues. THAT was when I did the work that ensured that my stress report would be done on time.

There are four phases to learning how to be a good stress analyst.

1. You have to learn the Codes.

2. You have to learn how to use the software.

3. You have to learn how people are going to build things that correspond to what you put into the software model.

4. You have to learn how to get people to apply what you have learned in 1 and 3 to their designs so that it makes 2 easier for you.