Introduction to the Calculation Process

The buttons on the Calculation toolbar are to prepare your drawing for a hydraulic calculation. The HydraCAD drawing will be read by the AutoCalcs program. It will gather information about your system, such as pipe lengths, fittings, sprinkler characteristics, water supply, additional flow, remote area, required density, etc., and transport this information to the Hydratec HydraCALC program in preparation for a calculation. The AutoCalcs routine can be an involved process, and for a successful migration of the data from the HydraCAD drawing to the HydraCALC program, you must ensure that the drawing has been prepared correctly. You must perform the following steps to ensure that the transfer is correct:

1.       Make sure that you have followed the instructions for the previous toolbars in the preparation of your drawing. The pipes must be connected properly with no hanging ends or overlaps. The pipes must be in the correct layer. SPRKDAT1 for mains, SPRKDAT2 for lines, SPRKDAT3 for underground and SPRKDAT4 for armovers.

2.       You can leave the pipes unsized (diameter of ‘?’) or you can size the pipes in advance. Many users prefer to size the pipes themselves in order to ensure that they get the pipe sizes that they are expecting.

3.       Sprinklers must be inserted correctly and their properties correctly specified such as style and K-Factor. Sprinklers must be in the SPRNKS layer.

4.       You must be able to produce a 3D System Model without serious errors.

5.       The drawing must be correctly Tagged for the AutoCalcs process. The tags for sprinklers indicate which sprinklers are active. Another essential tag is for the water supply properties and location. How these tags are applied will be covered in this section.

6.       You are required to specify your hydraulic design options such as hose flow requirements, how the pipes will be sized, pipe type and C-Factor, fitting types, the number of remote areas, and density requirements. These topics will also be covered in this section.

7.       HydraCAD includes a routine called Check Ups which will check your drawing for errors. You should run this routine before attempting to run AutoCalcs. Fix any major problems that are pointed out by Check Ups.

8.       Run the AutoCalcs routine and enter the HydraCALC Program.

9.       Adjust pipe types, C-Factors, and add valves and backflow preventers, if necessary.

10.   Run a preliminary hydraulic calculation and adjust pipe diameters to suit the water supply.

11.   Return to the HydraCAD drawing where AutoCalcs will insert pipe diameters and reference nodes  from the HydraCALC Program.

12.   Check to ensure that the data returned from the HydraCALC Program is reasonable. Check the automatically generated pipe diameters and reference points.

13.   Fine tune and clean up the pipe diameters and detail your drawing.