CAD program for pipelines

[Iputpipe]

I supply steel pipes and fittings to civil contractors in the sewer and water reticulation field. I need to download a simple CAD program to assist me in drawing and designing pipes and pipe fittings. Can anyone recommend a good one?

 

[Climbmiller]

It depends on what you are trying to achieve. If you want to lay out pipework and fittings in a building environment you would do a lot worse than look at Autodesk Building Systems. This product allows you to take architectural data and design, in 3D, pipework and electrical services.

If its the actual design and manufacture of the fittings that you are into then you need to look at a parametric 3D modeller. By far the most widely used in this industry is Pro/ENGINEER for which you can buy a pipe design extension (costs around 18000GBP with the extension or 4500GBP if you just want the core modeller) - but if you are looking for something dead easy to use and relatively cheap you could investigate Autodesk Inventor Professional which has a piping and fittings module (costs around 6000GBP)

Hope this helps ....

 

[jhardy1]

If you are looking for a cheap CAD system (you said "simple", so I assume budget is also an issue), you could look at TurboCAD from

http://www.imsisoft.com

TurboCAD comes in both Deluxe (i.e. basic - don't you just LOVE marketing?!) and Professional versions. Both versions are 2D and 3D, and will exchange AutoCAD dwg and numerous other CAD file formats.

The main advantage of Pro is that it handles true solids using the ACIS solid modelling engine, while Deluxe uses only surfaces. (The distinction is important if you understand what it means, and probably irrelevant if you don't!) Pro also has a more comprehensive feature set, bigger range of file formats it can handle, better photo-realistic rendering, etc. You could always upgrade from Deluxe to Pro if you discovered you want / need the extra features.