PIPENET VISION

TRAINING MANUAL
USER INTERFACE

CHAPTER 2

OUTPUT BROWSER AND GRAPH VIEWER

Revision 0.2, February 2016

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1 OUTPUT BROWSER ............................................................................................................................... 2

1.1 INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................................................ 2
1.2 NAVIGATION............................................................................................................................................ 3
1.3 SEARCH ................................................................................................................................................. 3
1.4 COPY ..................................................................................................................................................... 4
1.5 FONT PARAMETERS ................................................................................................................................. 5
1.6 PRINT ..................................................................................................................................................... 6
2 GRAPH VIEWER ...................................................................................................................................... 8
2.1 INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................................................ 8
2.2 SMART OUTPUT....................................................................................................................................... 8
2.3 ZOOM AND MAGNIFIER .......................................................................................................................... 13
2.4 PIPE MOVIE .......................................................................................................................................... 15
2.5 PRESSURE ENVELOPE AND GRAPH CUSTOMIZATION ................................................................................ 16
2.6 EXPORT GRAPH AS .CSV....................................................................................................................... 19
2.7 SHARE Y-AXIS OPTION........................................................................................................................... 20
2.8 COMPARISON BETWEEN TWO DIFFERENT NETWORKS .............................................................................. 22
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1 Output Browser
1.1 Introduction
In PIPENET 1.8 a new Output Browser has been introduced. It offers new useful
capabilities which will be extremely useful for the user.

The Output Browser is a common tool to all the PIPENET Modules. It is important to
understand how to work with the Output Browser in order to fully exploit PIPENET 1.8.

The ribbon has just two menus: File Menu and Home menu

 File Menu: It allows opening .out files and printing the report.
 Home Menu: It allows performing the previous actions and copying, navigating,
searching and changing font parameters.

Below you can find a screenshot of the Browser. Note that, at the bottom of the window we
can see the name of the file open by the Browser, the current page and the text
“Searching for” which will be useful when we search for a given text in the file.

Let us start the tutorial, opening the file corresponding to the licensed module. Three
different files are included in the folder corresponding to this chapter: Spray.sdf,
Standard.sdf and Transient.sdf. Open the relevant file and perform the calculation.

The screenshots in this document belong to the Spray Module, but the steps are similar to
every module.
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1.2 Navigation
There are different ways to navigate along the text. The first one of them is to employ the
different buttons in the “Navigation” section.

Try clicking on each one of them and note how the Browser changes the current page.
Remember you can see the current page you are at in the left bottom part of the Browser
window.

The second way is going directly to a given page. For instance, in the box next to “Go to
page”, write the number 5 and press the key Intro. We see that we have change the page
and in the left bottom corner the text “Page 5 of…” appears.

The third way is to scroll the navigation bar at the right of the window. This will allow us to
navigate through the different pages in a continuous way. Click on the bar, hold and drag
it to the top to get back to the first page.

The fourth and last option is using the navigation keys in the keyboard: up and down keys
makes the Browser to navigate continuously through the document, whereas keys Home,
End, Page Up and Page Down have the same effect than clicking on the different green
arrows in the navigation section.

1.3 Search
In this section we explain how to find a given text. Click on “First page” to locate the file at
the beginning of the document. Next, in the box next to “Search” write “Pressure” and click
on “Search forward”.

Then, the Browser places as current page the one containing the first appearance of the
word “Pressure” in the text. This word is highlighted now.
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If you continue clicking on “Search Forward” and “Search Back”, you can navigate through
the different appearances of the word “Pressure”. Note that the search does not make a
difference between uppercase and lowercase letters and a notification showing where the
text has been found is shown at the right bottom corner:

The capability of searching for a given text is especially useful to find problems in the
simulation using the words “warning”, “error”, “fail” or “abort”.

1.4 Copy
The user can copy part of the text or the whole document open by the Browser. To copy all
the text, go to section “Copy” and input the number 1 in the Start Page box and the total
number of pages in the box End Page which is shown in the bottom left corner of the
window.

Click in Copy Pages and the text will be placed in the clipboard ready to paste in a text file
or a text processor file. A similar proceeding can be used to copy a range of pages. You
can try this for the range 2-5.

If you just want to copy a small part of the text you can follow the standard procedure of
click, hold and drag to highlight and select a text.
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Then, you can right click and select Copy, press Ctrl+C in the keyboard or click the button
Copy Text. In this way the text is placed in the clipboard.

1.5 Font parameters

The Browser allows changing the font and the size of the text. In the section “Font”, select
Arial in the drop-down menu where the default font, Courier New, is shown.
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You can see that the font has changed.

For a better visibility, increase the size of the font selecting 16 in the drop-down menu
where the number 12 is shown, which is the default font size.

1.6 Print
To print the report, click on the Print button in the File section of the home menu.
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This will open a dialog box where you can choose the printing device, as well as the range
of pages to print and the number of copies.
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2 Graph Viewer
2.1 Introduction
In PIPENET Vision 1.8 a new graph viewer has been included. It is important to have a
complete understanding of the new capabilities of the graph viewer to fully exploit the
power of Transient Module.

The ribbon has five different menus:

 Home menu. It contains general settings like the type of graphs shown in the left
pane.
 Chart menu. Here, the user can customize the chart area, which is where graphs
will be plotted. It controls the title of the graph, legend and zoom, annotation font
and Y-axis sharing
 Graph menu. This menu includes the parameters for the curve customization.
 Axis menu. Here, different parameters of the grid lines of the graph can be set, as
well as show/hide the grids.
 Insert menu. Provides the user with the option of including texts and arrows in the
chart.

At the top left of the window, the user can find several buttons to open a .res file, close a
file, close the graph viewer, copy the graph to the clipboard and save the parameters as
defaults.

More detailed description about each one of the buttons can be found in the User Manual
or PIPENET Transient’s Help File.

2.2 Smart output

One of the main enhancements in PIPENET Transient Module 1.8 is the Smart Output
option.

Open the file GVScenario1.sdf with PIPENET, perform the calculation and when it finishes
open the graph viewer.
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In the left pane, double click on the text line containing the full location of the .res file
corresponding to the simulation and, again, double click on “All variables of operating
valve 1” and select “Inlet pressure of operating valve” by double clicking again. We obtain
the following graph:

We see that the largest value for the pressure is 85 bar g. Now, go back to PIPENET
VISION. By clicking on the valve, we can see that the highest pressure at the inlet is 87.46
bar g but this value is not shown in the graph because of the difference between
calculation and graphical time step.

The biggest pressure in the network is reached at the inlet of pipe 10, so let us show this
value in the graph viewer. First, delete the plotted graph selecting the graph in the legend
and clicking on the tab with the red cross “Close” right above the legend.

Next, we plot the graph “Pressure 0 metres along pipe 10” following an analogous
procedure to the one described previously and we obtain the following picture, where the
maximum value for the pressure is 91.39 bar G, whereas in the data window, we can see
that it is 91.96 bar G.
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In this particular case, the difference between the maximum in the graph and in the
calculus is relatively small.

In PIPENET VISION 1.8 the “Smart Output” option appears in the Calculation Options
menu:
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By ticking the corresponding box, even though the graphical time step is larger than the
calculation time step, maximum and minimum values will be shown in the graph. In this
way, if we perform the calculation when this option is activated we see the following graph
for the pressure at the inlet of the valve:
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The maximum value of the graph is now 87.46 bar G, as it was indicated in the properties
window.

This characteristic is especially important for systems where cavitation is produced as the
surge, for this cases, are really quick and can be easily overlooked by the graph viewer
unless graphical and calculation time step coincide.

Finally, let us try an extreme case. Now, set the graphical time step to be the total of the
simulation time, 240 seconds, with Smart Output selected.

We obtain the following graph for the pressure at the inlet of the valve.
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The maximum value is 87.46 bar G again. What we have effectively done in this case is
letting the program to decide automatically what values are relevant for the graphic display
of the results.

Please, note that Smart Output produces larger .res files than the classic output for the
same graphical time step. For that reason, we recommend to run the simulation in the first
place with the smart output option unselected. The reason for this is that, if a scenario has
very quick oscillations extending for a long period of time, all these oscillations will be
captured by the graph viewer and it could potentially create a graph with as many data
points as we had if we set the graphical time step to be the same as the calculation time
step.

2.3 Zoom and Magnifier

The orange bars appearing at the left and bottom of the chart control the zoom.

Open the file GVScenario2.sdf, perform the calculation and open the graph viewer. Select
graphs “Outlet pressure of operating valve 1” and “Volume of vapour slug of pipe 2”.

Click and hold the right end of the orange horizontal bar and drag it towards the left until
only the interval between 0 and 40 s is shown.
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Next, click on the centre of the orange bar, hold and slide it along the blue bar to move the
40 s interval along the simulation.

In this way, we can check that, when the pressure at the outlet of the valve drops until the
vapour pressure, a cavity starts to form and when the cavity collapses there is a sudden
increase of the pressure. To go back to the initial state, just double click on the centre of
the orange bar.

If we are only interested in the local details of the graphs, we can use the magnifier. To
activate it, click on the check box next to “Enable magnifier” in the Home menu. When the
option is enabled and we hover over the chart, we can see amplified the area over which
we are hovering.
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The controls “Zoom factor” and “Magnifying radius” control the magnifier parameters.

2.4 Pipe Movie

If we have selected distance graphs for a pipe, we can see a movie of how the profile of
the different magnitudes evolves along time.

To show the movie of how the pressure varies along pipe 2, open the graph viewer and
click on “Distance Graphs” in the Home menu. Then double click on the location of the file
to show all the components which are available to show. Next double click on “Pipe 2” and
click to highlight “Pressure/bar G”. Finally click on “Show Movie” in the Home menu and
we will see the profile of the pressure along the pipe varying with time. A progress bar
appears next to “Pressure/bar G”.

We can stop the movie at any time by clicking in “Stop movie” in the Home Menu.
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2.5 Pressure envelope and graph customization

In non-branched systems, it is possible to plot the pressure envelope along the network. In
order to do that, in Calculation Options, the check box next to “Output pressure envelope”
has to be ticked.

Now, in the graph viewer, select “Pressure Envelope” in the Home menu and double click
on the .res file to see two options: “distance along network” and “distance along ground”.
Double click on “distance along network” and select the three available graphs.

Now, let us customize the resulting graph. We will change the colour to red, blue and
green to the maximum pressure, minimum pressure and height profile graphs respectively.
Also we will make the pressure graphs to be dashed.
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In order to do that, click on the title of “Minimum pressure envelope” in the legend and then
click on the Graph menu. Edit the colour by clicking in the small triangle next to it and
provide the RGB values 0,0,225 respectively. Then, in “Line style” select the fifth option.

Proceed analogously with the two other graphs. RGB values for “Maximum pressure
envelop” are 255,0,0 and for “Network height profile”, they are 0,150,0. The following
graph is obtained.

Now, introduce the title of the graph “Pressure Envelope” by going to the Chart menu and
writing the title in the text box in the section Title. In the same section, activate the
boldface option, change the font to Cambria and the font size to 40.
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It is quite clear to localize where the operating valve is located. It is placed 5697.33 m
away from the inlet of the network. This can be explicitly specified with annotations.
Double click on the centre of the graph to create a text box. Then, click inside the text box
and write “Shut-off Valve position”. Next, while the text box is selected, click on the menu
Chart, and in the Annotations section, click on the bold face button.

Then, click and hold at the right of the text box and drag it until the corner of the Maximum
pressure graph to create an arrow. Follow the same procedure with the other pressure
graph. The following final graph is obtained.
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2.6 Export graph as .CSV

A “comma separated value” or .csv file are text files containing different entries whose
values are separated by commas. These files can be open in spread sheet programs as
MS Excel.

Open GVScenario3.sdf and perform the calculation. Select the graph “Inlet pressure of
operating valve 1” in the directory tree to highlight it and the click on the option CSV in the
Export section of Home menu. In this way, a dialog box is open, where we can introduce
the name of the file where we want to save this data.

Below you can see the first entries of the .csv file created when opened with MS Excel.
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2.7 Share Y-axis option.

One of the new features introduced in this version of the graph viewer is the possibility to
make that every curve has its own scale. Note this option is disabled while a movie is
shown in the Graph Viewer.

Let us see the following example. Open the file GVScenario.sdf and perform the
calculation. Open the graphical results and select “Volume of air of pipe 2” and “Volume of
air of pipe 1”. We obtain the following graph.

We see that the order of magnitude varies between both graphs. In order to better
appreciate the variation between both profiles, go to Chart menu and uncheck the option
“Share Y-axes where possible”. Next, change the colour of “Volume of air of pipe 1” to
black (RGB 0,0,0) and “Volume of air of pipe 2” to dark red (RGB 139,0,0).

The graph looks too populated, so we proceed to hide the grid corresponding to the red
graph. Click on Axis menu and then on “Volume of air of pipe 2” in the legend. Next,
deselect the text box “Show grid” in the section Y Axis.
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We can see now the graph as follows:

We can unlink the colour of the grid from the colour of the graph corresponding to pipe 1.
Click on “Volume of air of pipe 1” in the legend and deselect the option “Colour Match Y-
Grid” in the axis menu.

To finally present the graph, click while holding Ctrl key on the title “Volume of air of pipe
1” and click on Copy.
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We obtain the following picture, ready to copy in a text processor:

2.8 Comparison between two different networks

Open and execute the calculation for the two files contained in folder GVScenario5 taking
into account where the different .res files are saved. After the last simulation, open the
graphical results to show the Graph Viewer. Click and hold on the right edge of left pane
and drag towards the centre until the whole location of the file is shown.

Now, click on the Open icon in the top left corner, browse to the location of the other file
and open it.
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Now, let us compare the pressure at the outlet of the caisson for each one of the different
cases. First, go to the directory tree corresponding to Cv = 200000 and select “Outlet
pressure of two-node caisson 1”.

Next, repeat the same procedure for the Cv = 50000 case.

Finally, add arrows and annotations to reflect clearly to which case corresponds each
curve.