Information about verification added

Verification of the Ple4Win program has always been an important part of the program’s development. However, what we do and have done in this area has not been described to our users generally. Individual questions have been answered of course, and the process has been explained if asked.

Now a new section has been added to our website describing what verification is and how it is implemented concerning the Ple4Win program.

Ple4Win and Windows 7

As you most likely know support for the Windows 7 operating system has ended on January 14, 2020. Users are strongly encouraged to change their operating system to Windows 10.
Up until now our experience is that in-place upgrades from Windows 7 (and Windows 8.x) to Windows 10 are still possible without the necessity of buying a Windows 10 license (i.e. a valid Windows 7/8.x license is still accepted as valid Windows 10 license). We can’t of course guarantee this, your mileage may vary…

What does the end of Windows 7 mean for for our users of Ple4Win?

Most important, Ple4Win does not suddenly stop working on computers still using Windows 7. Actually, the current version of the program has been developed and tested with both Windows 7 and Windows 10.

However, subsequent versions of the Ple4Win program are developed and tested using only Windows 10. But as long as the tools used to develop and run the program are not fundamentally changed, future versions of our program should still run on Windows 7 without problems.

Officially, us supporting Ple4Win on Windows 7 ended with the end of support for Windows 7. So from now on Ple4Win is only supported if used with Windows 8.1 (depreciated) or Windows 10, see the requirement page.
Which does of course not mean that we will not support users still using Windows 7. If you have a problem, please let us know, and we will look into it. However, should the underlying operating system turn out to be the problem, then most likely we will be unable to fix it. If the problem is in the program itself, we will handle it as a ‘normal’ issue.

Should Ple4Win really become incompatible with Windows 7 somewhere in the future, we will announce this on this website.

Best wishes for 2020

The device of the English artist (“Yes we can”)  is very appealing to us, engineers.

It seems impossible to observe buried objects (well), however, like the ostrich, having the largest eyes of all bird species and capable to see quickly and miles away, we bury our head in the sand for over 50 years to analyse the behaviour of underground pipelines and to develop a computer program for the calculation of the strength and stability of those pipelines: Ple4Win.

We hope to continue the cooperation with you and wish you a successful 2020!

Rien Radder (director EDS)
PLE-Team

PleEdu4Win 4.6.0 released

The educational PleEdu4Win version 4.6.0 has been released. This version contains all improvements, modifications and adaptations of the professional Ple4Win version 4.6.0, where applicable. As with previous educational versions, this program can be downloaded and used freely to gain a good insight into what the Ple4Win program can do.

Download Ple4Win Educational 4.6.0.

The main highlights of the new release are:

• User interface improvements such as keeping tables and visualizations open during design function changes, if possible.
• Input tables with errors now show these on opening the table.
• Program’s response to stopping/aborting calculations improved.
• Better support for problematic graphics cards/adapters.
• License type and expiration date (if applicable) now shown in the “About”-screen.

Elastic Bend behaviour example added

A new example has been added to our new ‘beyond the box’-category of application scope examples for Ple4Win. This one is about calculations of elastic pipeline bends. Follow this link to the full description of the example.

Ple4Win 4.6.0 released

Ple4Win version 4.6.0 has been released. This version contains new calculation functionality as well as a number of improvements, modifications and adaptations. For a detailed description of all that is new and changed, please see the online change log.

The key highlights of the new release are:

• Redistribution of the pipe ovalisations in the ‘Pipeline Behaviour’ design function (5).
• Values of the material stress-strain diagram can now be exported to Excel.
• Additional output is generated and reported with pipes under compressive stress for easier user assessment of possible buckling,
• User interface improvements such as keeping tables and visualizations open during design function changes, if possible.
• Improved copy-paste (e.g. multi-cell pasting) and Excel import/export (e.g. auto-toggle on import),
• License type and expiration date (if applicable) now shown in the “About”-screen.

Redistribution of ovalisations

Prior to this new Ple4Win version the redistribution of the pipe ovalisations was performed only in the ‘Cross Section Data’ design function. However, in case of large plastic deformations of the pipe this approach is not completely appropriate because the influence of the redistibution on the curvature of the pipe during the beam calculation – being large – is neglected. Therefore  the option has been added to perform the ovalisation redistribution in the ‘Pipeline Behaviour’ design function already.
If the resulting plastic deformations are moderate, the effect of this redistribution is small, but in the landslide example below it is huge, resulting in much lower strains. When installing the new 4.6.0 version the two landslide projects are delivered as well to illustrate the effect.

Improvements

• Program’s response to stopping/aborting calculations improved.
• Better alert of the user if iteration criterion is not satisfied after completion of the ‘Pipeline Behaviour’ calculations (design function 5).
• Input tables with errors now show these on opening the table.
• Unavailable input tables are no longer copied from the secondary database.
• Better support for problematic graphics cards/adapters.
• Additional information on ‘ideal’ mitre bend design and better warnings about its model limits.
• And more …

Courses for Ple4Win users

The performance, accuracy and speed of a project calculated using Ple4Win depends for not a small part on how the project is modeled. More often than not, a good pipeline model has greater benefits than e.g. a faster computer and may prevent lots of calculations on model variations. We are providing for a course on the art of making a good functional pipeline model. This half-day course is primarily intended for experienced users.

For more detailed information, call +31 (0)70 390 2386 or contact EDS.

We also offer courses for inexperienced users and dedicated training for individuals or small groups, focused on specified wishes of the attendees and/or going into details of specific problems the attendees have encountered. The combination of a course together with a project to be calculated is also possible. Again, contact us for more information.

Ple4Win forum

For support or advice, please visit the Ple4Win forum. There you can also read the FAQs, tips & tricks, report your findings or tell us your views.

Forum has been restored

After the website hack we endured in 2018 our first priority was to restore the website. After that, the forum was addressed, but restoration (including full content, thread numbering, internal links etc.) proved to be much more complicated than expected.

But now the Ple4Win forum has been restored. Credentials for forum users also have been restored, so the forum can be used immediately by former users without the need to re-register. As a safety precaution we advise all users to change their login password manually after the first login.

To visit the forum, please follow this link.

ir. Gerard Kruisman (1936 – 2018)

Met veel verdriet maken wij bekend dat op woensdag, 12 september 2018 ir. Gerard Kruisman is overleden, de oprichter van r+k Consulting Engineers, onze inspirator en motivator.

Gerard Kruisman, civiel ingenieur, Ridder in de Orde van Oranje-Nassau, is rustig ingeslapen na een periode van afnemende gezondheid. Hij is 82 jaar oud geworden.

Hij was tot het laatst actief betrokken bij ons bedrijf. Wij van Expert Design Systems en r+k Consulting Engineers zullen zijn unieke stijl van leiden, zijn visies en ideeën missen.

Wij gaan vol vertrouwen het werk voortzetten dat hij opgestart heeft. Hij zal door zijn collegae zeer gemist worden.

It is with deep sorrow that we inform you of the death of the founder of r+k Consulting Engineers, our inspirator and motivator, Gerard Kruisman MSc on Wednesday, September 12, 2018.

Gerard Kruisman, Master of Civil Engineering, Knight in the Order of Orange-Nassau, passed away peacefully in his sleep after a period of illness. He was 82 years old.

Up until very recently, he was actively participating with our company. We at Expert Design Systems and r+k Consulting Engineers will miss his unique way of leadership, his visions and ideas.

We have full confidence to continue the work he once started. He will be severely missed by his colleagues.

Restoring website after hack

This website and the website of our sister company r+k Consulting Engineers have been hacked recently. Our apologies for that.

We are in the process of restoring both websites. While this is happening, some parts of the website such as the forum can be offline. Please be patient, we will restore functionality as soon as possible.

As the websites are hosted separately and no personal information is asked or stored (even the e-mail addresses for download are not retained) there has been no data breach, no personal identification information could have been obtained by the hackers.

Ple4Win 4.5.0 updated

After releasing version 4.5.0 some bugs in the calculation core have been discovered that influence the calculation of mitre bends.

We updated (patched) the program to correct these, see the change log for more details.

If you use the mitre bends functionality (I module) please only use the patched version of the program. In all other cases we still encourage users to un-install the original version 4.5.0 and install the updated version afterwards, but it is not strictly necessary.