The Development Of An Integrated Platform For The CAE Analysis Of Pipelines Based On SALOME

The simulation analysis using CAE software during the design of modern pipelines is one of the critical steps. To this end, a variety of CAE programs have developed, such as CAESAR II, PIPESTRESS, PIPENET, and Flowmaster, which are one-dimensional programs. Meanwhile, in order to fully understand the fluid flow and stress distribution in local areas like the bend, the design engineer also uses general three-dimensional CAE programs such as FLUENT, Star-CD, ABAQUS, ANSYS for further analysis. However, the data formats of these CAE programs are different. To use the data of the analysis results of another CAE program, data transforms are required for both one-dimensional and threedimensional analysis, and some programs even cannot share data files. Therefore, to realize the data exchange between different CAE programs, a lot of manual intervention is needed during the simulation analysis of pipelines, which will delay the design, and even generate design errors caused by inevitable mistakes.To solve the problem of the data transform between different CAE programs for the simulation analysis of pipelines, an integrated platform for managing the CAE analysis process is developed. The platform development is based on SALOME. The main research results in this paper are summarized as follows:(1) Based on the analysis of the design process for pipelines, typical CAE programs which can meet the functional requirements are selected and incorporated. The open-source software SALOME is used to integrate the selected CAE programs. The functions and interfaces to the selected CAE programs are provided. The platform can be used to manage the input and output of the selected CAE programs.(2) To suit the analysis and design of pipelines, one-dimensional and threedimensional geometrical models and boundary conditions can be generated using the platform, and the platform will extract the calculation results data of the former as the calculations parameters the latter automatically.(3) The data transform from one-dimensional results to there-dimensional analyses are provided in the platform. The analysis results from one-dimensional and there-dimensional analyses can be processed using the platform.(4) Some of the interfaces are developed using C++. With the help of interfaces, user could realize the data exchange from one-dimensional to threedimensional analysis programs.The developed platform is carefully verified using one selected case histories. Compare with the traditional analysis results, the results of the verifications show that the integrated platform can effectively and correctly transform data files between different CAE programs, speedup the analysis and design of pipelines.