Structural Analysis Post-Processing Java Tool

Overview

Westinghouse Electric Company designs and analyses more than 6,000 piping supports when designing a nuclear power plant. These structures require numerous evaluations to ensure safe design to meet industry regulations and safety protocols. Westinghouse would like to modernize these labor intensive calculations to a user-friendly framework. Digitizing the evaluations would lead to a significant reduction in design time, improve the quality of analyses, and enable a digital design management.

Objectives

The objective of this project is to develop a digital engineering tool in the Java programming language that will read and parse output data from an in-house design program. Using that data in addition to user inputted data, it must then perform ASME Code mechanical and structural calculations.

Approach

– Conduct weekly meeting with the sponsor to receive feedback

– Identify the key deliverables and set a timeline to follow

– Write initial parser to gather needed data before beginning evaluations

– Manually inspect and compare parsed data with the original file to confirm correct performance

– Define classes for each required evaluation

– Create a pseudocode document to identify which values will be needed from the parsed documents and how to define them in the evaluation code

– Create arrays for all relevant databases for quick and easy implementation into the evaluation code

– Create J-Unit testing procedure for evaluations to validate final code. Compare values with expected values as provided by Westinghouse Electric Company

Outcomes

– The program will complete over 300 calculations previously completed all by hand, making the design team more efficient in the process

– Our code, once implemented with a GUI, will take the place of a previously used program which was not user friendly and had several bugs

– The project will improve safety at Westinghouse Electric Company’s nuclear plants, ensuring proper protocols are met in the designs