Pipe supports in Tube and Pipe

[Anonymous]

Hi

Is there any feature that automatically adds pipe supports in T&P?  I.e. if you select a surface and a location in a pipe run it will support the pipe at that point from that surface?

Or do I need to manually model the supports and bring them into the assembly in the normal way? 

Thanks

[Mark.Lancaster]

henrijq

Pipe supports are not part of the routed system interface so you have to manually do them.  @cbenner may have a work flow for you..

[cbenner]

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@Mark.Lancaster wrote:

henrijq

Pipe supports are not part of the routed system interface so you have to manually do them.  @cbenner may have a work flow for you..

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@Anonymous I'm afraid I do not have any workflow for this, we don't use any sort of pipe supports in our designs.  These are alwys fabricated on the shop floor depending on the needs of the design.  Most of what we use are custom brackets and cushioned u-bolts. (which can be downloaded from McMaster Carr.)

@salariua... didn't you do something with pipe supports a while back?

[Anonymous]

Thank you both for the replies.

Never mind, I'll sort something out.

[salariua]

Pipe clips, hangers ? or brackets and fabricated pieces ?

Not an easy subject but for frames, brackets, fabricated pieces you might want to investigate icopy and imates.

If the pipe clips don’t change in length (like a welded base pipe clip, google for pasilac clips) then you can author them as branch fittings and publish them to content center. This will allow you to drop them as any fitting and select orientation and rotation. If you don’t like breaking the route (it creates a new node) then don’t author them as T&P and use imates, or plain constraints.

Keeping them in library as iparts doesn’t work because ipart members are created as derived components and they lose the authoring information. However, publishing iparts to Content Center will generate a copy of the main part with changed parameters so the T&P authoring info is preserved.

For adjustable length parts (like pipe clips with custom length studs) you can use ilogic. Unfortunately there is a limitation here as well. You cannot place ilogic components authored as T&P because Inventor places the main part not the customized part.

For that I open another inventor session and disable T&P addin. Then I generate ilogic components here and place them using “Place Fitting” in the other inventor session where T&P addin is enabled.

Here are more thoughts on this:

http://blog.ads-sol.com/2015/03/inventor-pipe-clips.html

Check the video and download the files at the very end and have a play with them.

[Anonymous]

@salariua thank you again for such a comprehensive answer!

I'm hoping to reuse what's already on site as much as I can.  Since my original post I went to have a look and each support is different - they're all made up of bits of angle iron and box section welded together.  They're all supporting the pipework from underneath.  There are no clips around the pipes that I can see (there may be some under the lagging) so I'm not bothering to model them, but I've had a look at your link and that stuff is really useful so I may well use it in the future.

At the moment I'm making angle iron and box sections as custom iParts, then I can stick them together in the assembly to make each support.  They're not in any way mated to the pipe routes - they're just constrained to the concrete and manually adjusted so the supports sit underneath the pipes.

I will have  a look at icopy and imates as you suggest.

Many thanks again