Sewer System Seismic Analysis Made Practical

MSC is announcing a new business offering based upon a breakthrough technology. MSC has developed a means by which design engineers or occasional CAE software users can reliably perform complex engineering analysis with the same resultant quality as do the dedicated analysis experts. This breakthrough technology captures the expert’s engineering knowledge and specific process solution methodologies to enable and guide the novice. Now CAE can readily enhance the design processes where it was previously unavailable. Most importantly, large productivity gains are realized in the design process. The first practical test case for this technology was to solve the problem that prevented Sekisui Chemical Company from deploying their analysis methods for creating earthquake resistant designs. Sekisui Chemical Co. has developed new earthquake resistant PVC pipeline components. To support this new materials technology, complex nonlinear FEA models for evaluating system performance under earthquake loading were developed. The challenge now is to integrate for practical use, the performance analysis methods into the design process for system layout. Sekisui wishes to provide earthquake resistance checks for all new drainpipe system designs. Modeling of one sewer system layout, including selected earthquake loads and nonlinear soil behavior has required an average of 40-days for expert analysts. A radical departure from the traditional FEA modeling tool set is required to enable non-FEA-expert design engineers to use the developed sewer system analysis methodology. A sewer system modeling application was written in the form of extended HTML “drive pages” similar to web pages. Automation functions were produced by capturing MSC/PATRAN session files from the manual analysis process as performed by an expert. The special application written for Sekisui will reduce the effort of producing sewer system analysis models from 40-days, to a matter of hours. Furthermore, it will allow design engineers who are not FEA, earthquake engineering, or soil engineering experts to perform the job with expert quality results.