Setting pipe roughness

You can automatically set the roughness of pipes in your system based on the pipe Material and Year fields. The pipe Size is also relevant for the Hazen Williams roughness lookup.

Roughness lookup can be applied to pipes which have a Roughness Type of:

• Colebrook-White
• Hazen Williams
• Darcy Weisbach

as long as the appropriate table of values has been defined on the Pipe Materials dialog. You can look at the tables available for different pipe materials, and whether InfoWorks is using the built in tables or user defined values, by choosing Pipe Materials from the Tools menu.

Looking up values in the tables depends on having an appropriate entry in the Material and Year fields (and Size field for Hazen Williams) for the pipe. No changes will be made for the pipe if:

• any of these fields doesn't contain a value
• if the value in the Material field does not match one of the available types in the Pipe Materials dialog
• no lookup table is defined for the material

Lookup Methods

There are two methods of carrying out the lookup. You can:

• select a number of cells in the appropriate roughness column and use the context menu option
• use the Model menu option to make changes to all pipes. There are various methods you can use to limit the pipes affected by the changes. See below

Because these methods replace current values in the grid with new lookup values, it is probably a good idea to back up the existing values, and mark values that have changed with a special flag.

Model Menu

To make changes to the roughness values of some, or all, pipes you can use the option on the Model menu. InfoWorks will change all roughness values for pipes that meet the criteria listed above.

However, you can be more selective about what pipes are changed in several ways. You can:

• limit the pipes covered by the lookup by using a selection
• prevent changes to any pipe that already has a roughness value set
• prevent changes to pipes with a specified flag on the roughness field.

If you intend to change existing roughness values, we recommend that you store a copy of the original roughness values before carrying out this procedure. See Backing Up Old Values below.

1. Choose Set Roughness of Pipes from the Model menu. This displays the Set Value from Lookup Table dialog. Remember that the Model menu is only visible when there is a network open, and one of the network views is the Current Active WindowThe current Active Window in any Microsoft Windows application has a differently coloured title bar to all the other windows. In the default colour scheme, the active window title bar is blue, all other windows have a grey title bar..
2. There are several ways to limit the objects affected by the changes:
• Check Selected Objects Only to limit the changes to the currently selected pipes.
• Choose the Leave Existing Roughness Values Unchanged option to protect existing values in this field
• Choose the Overwrite Unless Have Flag option, and select a flag in the dropdown list. This prevents changes to any pipe where the roughness field has the chosen flag.
• Do not set a value in the Material field. The roughness cannot be looked up without a Material value.
• Do not set a value in the Year field. The roughness cannot be looked up without a Year value.
3. It is a good idea to create a special flag to mark roughness values changed using this procedure. Select the flag in the Set Roughness Values Flag To box. This flag will be applied to all roughness fields that have been changed.

context menu

To make changes to a series of roughness values using the context menu:

1. select one or more roughness value cells. You can select cells from any of the three roughness value columns.
2. right click any of the selected cells, and choose Current Cell(s) Value | Lookup New Value(s) for Cell(s) from the context menu. This displays the Set Value from Lookup Table dialog. If you select cells that are disabled, or where the Material, Year (and possibly Size) data is not set, the menu option will be unavailable.
3. The options from the dialog are the same as for the Model Menu method. See steps 2 and 3 above.

Backing Up Old Values

We recommend that you back up the roughness values in some way if you do intend to change existing values, so you can return to them if the automatically updated values are not appropriate.

One method would be to check the network in and then check out again so the old values are stored in the database in a previous version of the network.

A more flexible method is probably to copy the data from the appropriate roughness column of the grid and paste it into one of the User Number columns (or User Text if you do not have a numeric column available).

To copy the data:

1. select all the cells in the column and choose Copy from the Edit menu or press Ctrl-C. If you select the entire column by clicking the column header, make sure you click No when asked if you want to include the column header.
2. click the top cell of the User column where you want to paste the data. Make sure you scroll the grid back to the top if necessary.
3. choose Paste from the Edit menu, or right click and choose Paste from the context menu, or press Ctrl-V to paste the data into the new column
4. you can rename the column if you want to show what data it now contains. See Renaming Additional User Fields.

If you combine this procedure with a special flag set to mark changed values (see above), it is easy to see what InfoWorks has changed, and to go back to the old value if the change is inappropriate.

Moving the User Number column next to the particular roughness column will make comparison even easier.