Tube & Pipe With Various Pipe Sizes Joined Together

[Anonymous]

I'm learning Tube & Pipe and I need advice on whether using that environment is even worth the effort for my application.

Basically I have equipment with piping that will go up and down in pipe sizes all over the place. This is not a problem until you want to join some of this piping together with a tee. In the attached picture, the smaller piping (1 1/2") is not connected to the bigger piping (3"), they are just positioned close, but if anything moves, you will see the piping is not connected.

My first thought was run the 1 1/2" piping out to the same distance, then place 3" x 1 1/2" Reducers, a 3" elbow, and a 3" tee. That way I can have a 3" route connect the two fittings and continue on from there. The problem is an elbow and tee do not just line up with each other. They are ever so slightly off. So the run can never connect straight together.

So my second thought was reduce the length of the 1 1/2" route by the tiny amount to line them up. But this is very hard to make it work, as sometimes rounding occurs and if it is off by a thousandths of an inch, you can't have a straight run. Also, any changes in positions will break this, causing a bunch of errors.

I can use the very limited construction line feature that appears to be hidden in tube & pipe to make this connections dynamic. Which I did get to work, but was very time consuming and after all was working, I made an adjustment to an unrelated route and it crashed inventor and I lost all that progress.

Now I'm really questioning whether Tube & Pipe is the environment I want to work in. I love the simple placement of fittings in the routes, but the connectivity between piping leaves a lot to be desired.

Is there anything I'm missing? Is there some other approach I should be trying? Any advice?

Thank you so much for your time.

-Dan

[johnsonshiue]

Hi! I believe you would like to to be able to place multiple fittings together. If I understood how it worked correctly, there should be a way to do it by setting up the T&P styles but I am not 100% sure. Let me work with the project team and see if there is a better way to do it.

Many thanks!

[Yijiang.Cai · Accepted solution]

@Anonymous , it can be done here. Please create T&P style with the elbows defined, and place the tee fitting in the pipe. Please access the route sketch to add the co-linear constraint between two route sketch segments as inserting tee will cause the sketch split. Generally it only support one style in one pipe run. When the size of pipe run is different, please consider to create another pipe run to get it done.