ChiralitySWB Piping Designer · in development
Find the problem while it is still cheap to fix.
A piping flexibility environment where the agent has read the solver. Ask why a number came out the way it did. Ask it to build the model from the isometric, or to try three loop positions. For the routing decisions made before the formal check, with export to the tool your project relies on. In development, in the open.
Free and open source. Runs locally, on your own machine.
The problem
By the time the stress check runs, the layout is already committed.
The decisions that drive flexibility get made early, on judgement, because the tools that could test them need a mature model, a licence and a specialist. So the check arrives late, and what it finds is expensive.
The usual sequence
- Route it by judgement, because nothing else is available yet.
- Queue for a licence, or for the one person in the office who has one.
- Discover the anchor loads late, when steel is drawn and priced.
- Take the result on trust, because the method is inside a closed box.
With SWB Piping Designer
- Test a concept on the day you draw it.
- No licence to wait for and no specialist to book.
- See the load consequence of a decision while you are making it.
- Read the mechanics yourself, and trace any number back to the method that produced it.
What you get
Open mechanics, and a solver you can read.
It screens candidate designs. Validation happens where it already happens for you, in the professional tool your project accepts.
A real physical model
Schema-backed geometry, supports, loads and constraints, with units handled explicitly and never assumed.
A solver you can read
Classical flexibility mechanics, carried into a 3D frame solver and implemented openly, so a result traces back to the method that produced it.
Deterministic output
The same model gives the same answer, and a run is reproducible by someone who was not there.
An agent that has read the solver
The physics engine is files in the same folder. Ask about a result and the agent can show you the method. Ask for a model and it proposes operations you accept or reject.
Clean handoff
Structured export made for the formal check and for the engineer who will accept the result.
Your data stays put
Local first, with a clear boundary that keeps protected standards content out of the distribution.
What release will add
The hand calculations, published with the solver.
What exists today is an open technical preview. A released product will carry a full validation framework, including the part almost nobody publishes: the hand calculations that prove the mechanics.
Cantilever and frame behaviour, thermal growth, imposed displacement, stiffness transforms, axial, bending and torsional stress, pressure membrane, stress range. Each proved by hand against the classical result and held as a machine-readable record the automated comparisons bind to, so the version an engineer reads and the version the tests check cannot drift apart.
Why this exists on this site
It is the proof, and it is not finished.
Whether the method builds anything real is a fair question. This is the answer, in progress and in public: engineering software with a genuine solver, developed by agents under the same hold points and records the application gives you. Every design decision and acceptance in its development is a file in the repository.
Where the name comes from
SWB is for Shipman, Watts and Burrows, credited by the M. W. Kellogg Company for the general piping stress analysis methods their 1941 Design of Piping Systems turned into practice. The mechanics in this environment descend from that work, and naming it after them is the honest description of what this is: a method other people developed, implemented where anybody can read it, with a design stage the classical treatment could not have had.
Where the line is
It computes and helps you design. The prover validates. The responsible engineer accepts.
A design engine, not a certification tool. No output from it is an approval, a code compliance statement, or a professional opinion. Those remain with the engineer who signs.