SpecWave, EuResearch brought into the fold
AMSTERDAM – Bentley Systems used its Be Inspired event here to announce two acquisitions. The first is SpecWave, software that “helps architectural, engineering, construction, and operations (AECO) professionals author and configure structured text content, including engineering specifications and related codes and standards.” It will be combined with eB Insight and the to-be-released CONNECT SaaS environment to create Bentley Specification Services, which will allow “pecifications to be purposefully shared across distributed, multidisciplinary project, operations, and inspection teams.”
The second is EuResearch, which makes Microprotol, asoftware application for “the design and analysis of pressure vessels and heat exchangers.” It will extend Bentley’s AutoPIPE product suite to “span comprehensive pipe stress analysis for improved productivity and quality, with rigorous performance simulation capabilities for streamlined design, analysis, fabrication, and commissioning of pressure vessels and their associated pipework.”
SpecWave makes “it possible to reach inside structured documents to parse and organize the content at the semantic level of individual and unique text objects,” said Bhupinder Singh, senior vice president, Bentley Software, in a statement. “As a result, integral constituent parts of documents can now be harvested, persisted, accessed, repurposed, change-managed, and controlled, with text objects becoming a new fundamental data type for Bentley. Accordingly, we can next leverage the full enterprise-level information management capabilities of our eB Insight services for essential document contents starting with specifications, but also including, for example, compliance and safety documents. Finally, through Bentley CONNECT, Bentley Specification Services will enable corporate, project, and owner spec standards to be maintained, shared, tracked, and enforced across teams, projects, and enterprises.”
Of note is that SpecWave’s SPECX format is an endorsed standard for structured engineering content within Fiatech. Per the Fiatech website, “By combining good fit for the subject-matter domain with a good fit for tools and application development, the SPECX file format and associated schemas deliver a solid foundation for the interoperability of the most important documents in the capital facilities industry.”
In a statement regarding the EuResearch acquisition, Santanu Das, Bentley vice president, design, simulation, and information modeling, said, “In providing advanced tools for pressure vessel design and analysis, Microprotol software adds powerful new capabilities to our globally used AutoPIPE software for pipe stress analysis. Microprotol also adds capabilities to the Bentley OpenPlant plant design engineering software, as well as to our broad range of flexible and scalable integrated structural analysis and design offerings, including STAAD, RAM, ProSteel, and Structural Modeler. Most importantly, our ongoing integration work with Microprotol will soon deliver uniquely comprehensive performance simulation solutions across the fuller breadth of the plant lifecycle, offering users a step change in productivity while improving plant safety through enhanced design.”
Microprotol features include the ability to handle pressure vessels ranging from column, reactor, horizontal, and vertical drums to shell and tube heat exchangers, air coolers, steel stacks, and boilers; support for a comprehensive set of international standards including ASME, German, British, Russian, French, and European codes; cost estimation, auto calculation of bundle tube-layout, and complete air cooler design; inclusion of an XML database that enables users to connect to product data management systems (such as those for specification sheets and purchasing); and links to front-end engineering design to acquire all material and temperature data (e.g., from AspenTech Tasc and Tasc+, HTRI Xchanger, Prosim EXCH, and Honeywell UniSim).
