Bentley Acquires Microprotol to Extend AutoPIPE’s Position in High-pressure Plant Environments

CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

13 November 2012

Acquisitions

Bentley Acquires Microprotol to Extend AutoPIPE’s Position in High-pressure Plant Environments

Bentley Systems, Incorporated, today announced that it has acquired EuResearch, provider of Microprotol – a leading software application for the design and analysis of pressure vessels and heat exchangers. With this addition to its portfolio, Bentley extends its 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. Users in engineering and fabrication firms will benefit from the faster delivery of improved designs, and owner-operators will achieve safety and process improvements that enhance returns on investment. Microprotol users include the largest and most safety-conscious engineering, procurement, and construction contractors (EPCs), plant owners, consulting engineers, and manufacturing firms.

Victor Smirnov, CEO, ZAO Neftekhimproekt (NHP), which is headquartered in St. Petersburg, Russia, said, “NHP began using Microprotol in 2011, and we have thus far employed it on 30 projects. In each case we were able to improve the quality of our pressure vessel designs, leading to enhanced product safety, while substantially saving time – producing all deliverables, including specifications, detailed drawings, and bills of materials, in three days rather than typically two weeks.”

Commenting on the new acquisition, Santanu Das, Bentley vice president, design, simulation, and information modeling, said, “On behalf of my colleagues at Bentley, I welcome our new team members from EuResearch, all of whom are seasoned mechanical engineers from the industrial process sector. 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.”

Gérard Malhaire, former CEO of EuResearch, now serving as a consultant to Bentley, said, “Our organizations share development priorities in the key areas of plant safety, code compliance, and industry standards. Together, we will enable more complete information modeling for all high-pressure plant environments, leading to plant structures that can be delivered more quickly, and that are safer and more cost efficient to operate. Many of our users have told us how great it would be if they could incorporate the pressure vessel design and analysis functionality of our Microprotol software with the world-class piping analysis capabilities of AutoPIPE, and now they can.”

Mark Upston, Bentley director, structural solutions, said, “For many years plant design and construction teams have been saying to us that there have to be more efficient ways of incorporating vessel design. Often the vessel certification is still accomplished by way of paper transmittals, and it can take up to two years after the purchase order is issued to get certified vessel drawings back. This causes delays in construction through holds on the piping system or the re-issuing of many field weld instructions since the project team isn’t sure exactly what the vessel is going to look like.”

He continued, “Our users will be delighted that Bentley has acquired Microprotol. We have been the first software vendor to provide the innovative information mobility required for cross-discipline coordination workflows – for example, between AutoPIPE and STAAD, saving piping and structural engineering teams thousands of hours of design and review effort. With our uniquely integrated applications for structural and piping disciplines now extended to vessel design and analysis, they can work smarter, together, to deliver faster, more accurate, high-quality projects, and to improve plant safety.”

Among the many features of Microprotol are:

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);
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).

Additional information about Microprotol is available atwww.bentley.com/EuResearch.

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