The Holiday season is upon us and we have a few gifts for you. TOWER and SAPS now feature graphical joint, member and group editing. We are also now shipping a version of PLS-CADD that contains the crossing spans and tap modeling features we described in the November newsletter. In addition, PLS-CADD can now superpose SAPS or SAGSEC results on the profile or 3D views. New versions of PLS-CADD, SAPS, SAGSEC and TOWER, which incorporate these features, are ready now to simplify your work in the coming year.
In previous versions of TOWER and SAPS one potentially would have to search through hundreds of rows to find the element that one wanted to edit, a tedious and time consuming operation. Now with the graphical edit feature, you need only click on the element and the program automatically takes you to the correct row in the appropriate table. If you have performed an analysis, the program will also excerpt the appropriate usage information from the analysis report and display that information in the same screen in which you edit the members. In SAPS, this feature is quite useful when reviewing a line model with many structures in it. In TOWER, this feature can be used to optimize angle sizing. We've also added a graphical add angle member command to TOWER allowing you to add members merely by clicking on the desired end joints. Put together, these features represent a large step towards our goal of simplifying the creation and analysis of complex structure models.
Further simplifying multi-span sag-tension calculations, we enhanced PLS-CADD's integration with SAPS and SAGSEC. Particularly noteworthy is the capability to automatically export your PLS-CADD model to SAPS or SAGSEC, have SAPS or SAGSEC analyze it and overlay the results inside PLS-CADD's profile and 3D views. Once inside the profile view, the differences between ruling span and exact finite element based modeling can be easily quantified. You will be able to see the effects that structure stiffness, longitudinal insulator swing and unbalanced ice have on your line. Within seconds you will know if you have cause to be concerned about the approximations inherent in ruling span based analysis.
Finally, Alain Peyrot just returned from EPRI's training facility in Texas where he was co-teaching the "Advanced Structural Analysis and Design Methods for Electric Power Line Upgrading" class. It covers the use of PLS-CADD, SAGSEC, TOWER and our pole and frame programs in a cost-effective manner. Due to the popularity of the class we have scheduled another three sessions for 1999: March 15-18, July 12-15 and November 8-11. For more information please see our EPRI class web page or contact EPRI (Mark Ostendorp).
The current shipping versions of our software are listed below. If you are interested in obtaining the current shipping release of any of our applications, please send us email at info@powline.com. As always, we welcome your suggestions and comments on our software.
1999 has been a very successful year for us here at Power Line Systems and we would like to thank all of you for making it so.
Happy Holidays,
Staff of Power Line Systems, Inc.
