About Piping Toolset
Piping Toolset is a browser-based suite of piping, pressure-equipment, and support-structure calculators built and maintained by a practicing, licensed piping engineer — not by a software company guessing at what engineers need. Every calculator here is a check that gets run on real projects, published with its governing equation, its stated limitations, and a worked example locked to a test fixture that turns the build red the day a number moves.
Who builds this
Matthew Norris, P.E. — Founder — Licensed Professional Engineer (Mechanical / Piping) — holds active P.E. licensure in Arizona, California, Kansas, Missouri, North Carolina, and Texas, and a B.S. Mechanical Engineering from University of Missouri–Columbia (2013, cum laude). He has practiced mechanical and piping engineering continuously since 2013 — 13 years of stress analysis, support design, pressure-equipment work, and the calculation packages that carry them through review — delivered on capital projects through an international engineering consultancy. Connect on LinkedIn.
A large share of that time has been spent on the reviewing side of the desk rather than the producing side: supervising a department's pipe stress activity and setting its procedures and standard deliverables, checking stress packages produced by other engineers, coordinating stress workshare across offices on three continents, and sealing issued-for-construction documents as engineer of record. That is the vantage point this site is built from. A calculator whose numbers you cannot trace is useless to the person who has to sign for it, because the signature is the part that carries the liability.
That working context is the entire premise of this site. Piping Toolset did not begin as a product; it began as the set of checks he was tired of rebuilding in a spreadsheet on every job — pressure design thickness, branch reinforcement, stress intensification factors, displacement stress range, support spacing, spring variability, nozzle loads — packaged so they run in a browser and can be audited by whoever signs the drawing. Professional memberships: American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), member since 2013; Society of Piping Engineers and Designers (SPED), member since 2021.
Where the experience comes from
Roughly 13 years of project work across process, power, midstream, chemical, agricultural-processing and hygienic facilities, in lead engineering and project-management roles. Client names are deliberately left out — for another engineer reading this, the plant type and the actual scope are the part that carries information.
| Sector | Years | Representative scope |
|---|---|---|
| Power generation and cogeneration | 2019–2026 | Lead stress and mechanical engineering on simple-cycle peaking additions (paired LM6000-class gas turbines, ~99 MW per site), a 150 MW three-turbine plant, brownfield cogeneration with three paired gas-turbine/HRSG units making 600 psi process steam, and a gas-to-energy project pairing an integrated NGL plant with a 300 MW combined-cycle power block — establishing the stress design criteria, analyzing the power-block and balance-of-plant critical lines in CAESAR II and FEA, and qualifying the steam-turbine, HRSG and other major-equipment interfaces. Most recently, reheat piping at operating combined-cycle stations: a stress re-analysis of an existing hot reheat system to accept replacement stop valves of roughly 14,000 lb operating at 1,050 °F, with field verification, existing-support and supplementary-steel evaluation, and redline isometrics and support details for installation; and a root-cause study of recurring steam leaks around a cold reheat balancing valve, re-analyzed under the valve's new operating regime from the as-built design data and field observations, with support modifications recommended and verified. |
| Biomass, renewables and waste-to-energy | 2018–2023 | Two 65 MW steam-turbine generating stations burning agricultural waste and wood; three biomass boiler plants replacing heavy-fuel-oil units, including 20-bar boilers with condensing and back-pressure turbines and an electrostatic precipitator in an integrated CHP scheme; a landfill-gas renewable natural gas facility with an HDPE underground gas supply line; and waste-energy steam generation off an incineration process with engineered spring and strut supports to B31.1. |
| Agricultural processing and renewable fuels | 2024–2025 | Lead pipe stress engineer on a new Gulf Coast oilseed processing plant built beside an operating facility and designed to switch between soybeans and softseed crops — including winter canola and CoverCress — as renewable-fuel feedstocks: coordinating and analyzing every critical piping stress calculation, specifying the supports, and carrying the remaining piping engineering scope through to a 2026 start-up. |
| Chemical manufacturing — FRP piping in high-seismic service | 2025 | Lead piping engineer on modifications to an existing 125,000-ton-per-year liquid ferric chloride process in the high-seismic Mojave region of California: analyzing predominantly FRP piping systems for ASME and local code compliance, and placing and specifying the seismic restraints and flexible connectors that let the facility keep operating after a major earthquake. |
| Refining and petrochemical | 2013–2017 | Furnace effluent piping redesign in roughly 1,250 °F service; a fired-heater radiant tube bundle metallurgy upgrade with API 560 inlet and outlet stress analysis; a naphtha splitter tower addition with the associated line lists, service indices and material specifications; relief-valve outlet piping with column support clips and finite-element checks of the existing nozzles; and a shell-and-tube exchanger re-rated to a higher MAWP under ASME Section VIII. |
| Gas processing, midstream and LNG | 2013–2021 | Lead piping engineering on a $160 MM brownfield gas-plant expansion — inlet compression, condensate stabilization, cryogenic processing, residue compression and NGL treating — a $40 MM refrigeration and amine regeneration addition, and cryogenic piping stress and support design for an LNG train expansion tying into an operating train. |
| Pharmaceutical, life sciences and hygienic utilities | 2017–2025 | Two years as senior piping engineer on a US life-sciences portfolio — leading a piping design team from programming and feasibility through detailed design and construction documentation, establishing user requirements and design criteria, and preparing the hydraulic and stress calculations behind them. A crossover steam and condensate system at a vaccine manufacturing site, routed over existing personnel bridges to bypass the main utility tunnel and keep critical steam supply across the site — detailed piping, supports and P&IDs plus procurement of the specialty items, executed inside a critical shutdown with little margin for error. Plus a relocated two-stage steam pressure-reducing station at a pharmaceutical plant, including as-built documentation and integration with an existing high-purity hot-water skid and a new condensate return system; and heat-recovery and steam utility scope across industrial sites — feedwater, risers, sootblower and safety-relief lines, with finite-element analysis of steam-drum connections. |
| Vibration, dynamics and troubleshooting | 2015–2024 | Static and dynamic analysis of turbine-connected piping showing oscillating displacements, with stability and vibration-mitigation recommendations; dynamic analysis of petrochemical systems for water hammer, slug flow and relief-valve reaction, including modal analysis of piping near reciprocating equipment; qualification of new reciprocating-compressor piping against a third-party pulsation and vibration study — API 618 support compliance, support stiffness set to stay clear of the compressor's driving frequencies, and dynamic support clamps that resist vibration while allowing the hot relief-case thermal growth, validated in CAESAR II; and stress design criteria, critical-line analysis and support specification as lead stress engineer on grassroots process facilities. |
The recurring toolset across that work is CAESAR II, including its dynamics module, and AutoPIPE; dedicated finite-element software for local nozzle and shell checks on in-service towers, drums, exchangers and tanks; and the ASME books this site implements — B31.1 for power piping, B31.3 for process piping, B31.4 and B31.8 for pipelines, BPE for hygienic tubing, and Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code Section VIII Division 1 for pressure equipment — with ASME B31E and ASCE 7 behind the wind and seismic cases. The recurring deliverable never changes: a calculation package a reviewer can follow, disagree with, and stamp.
How the projects turned into these tools
Most calculators on this site trace to a specific class of problem that kept reappearing across those jobs:
- Hot and cold lines that will not forgive a routing decision. Furnace effluent piping near 1,250 °F and cryogenic LNG headers are opposite ends of one problem: restrained growth becomes moment, and moment becomes stress range. That work sits behind thermal growth, expansion loop sizing, and the B31.3 displacement stress range check.
- Supports that have to carry a real load. Engineered spring and strut supports on a waste-energy steam plant, and rigid spacing on everything else, are behind support spacing and spring hanger variability.
- Equipment interfaces, where piping stops being piping. Finite-element checks of steam-drum connections, and an operating column asked to accept new relief-valve loads, are behind nozzle load checks, the Kellogg equivalent-pressure flange screen, and PiperFEA.
- Pipelines and gas plants. Cryogenic processing, residue compression and NGL treating bring their own rating questions — behind pipeline wall thickness, MAOP and MOP, and B31G remaining strength.
- Transient and settling-flow problems. Valve closures on long liquid lines and solids-laden service are behind Joukowsky surge and slurry deposition velocity.
- Hygienic utilities. A pharmaceutical steam pressure-reducing station and its high-purity skid interfaces are behind the BPE line — dead legs, slope and drainability, and CIP velocity.
- Power piping re-qualified in place. Replacement hot reheat stop valves at 1,050 °F on an operating combined-cycle unit, and a cold reheat balancing valve that would not stop leaking, are the B31.1 work behind the B31.1 wall thickness card and the B31.1 FAQ pages on occasional loads, safety valve reaction forces, stress intensification factors and support spacing.
- Wind and earthquake on the model. FRP chemical piping in a high-seismic corner of California, and the wind and seismic cases on every outdoor rack since, are behind the B31E seismic design force and ASCE 7 wind load calculators and the load-case guide.
- Drawings produced nowhere near a CAD seat. Field walks, tie-in scoping and as-built capture are behind the browser isometric drawing tool.
Why you can check the numbers
Credentials are a starting point, not the argument. Every calculator on this site publishes its governing equation with code-paragraph citations, states its limitations plainly, and walks a fixture-verified worked example — and those fixtures re-run on every commit, so the published example and the live app cannot disagree without the build going red.
That gate is stricter than it sounds. The published worked-example results on each landing page are checked against the fixture's expected outputs at build time: a page cannot quote a number the locked test case does not produce. Code tables and allowable-stress data are never embedded — those are user inputs, taken from the edition your project actually invokes — so what the software is responsible for is the equation, and the equation is what gets locked.
- Validation methodology — how every calculator is verified.
- Fixture coverage — every module and locked case, regenerated each build.
- Calculation changelog — the versioned record of calculation behavior.
- Source & citation policy — where every number comes from.
What Piping Toolset is not
Being useful requires being narrow, and being trustworthy requires saying so. This is not a replacement for CAESAR II or AutoPIPE: there is no system flexibility model, no routing, no supports solved as a system. It is not a hydraulic network solver, not a 3D plant model, and not production CAD. It does not reproduce code tables, and it does not select allowable stresses for you.
It is an engineering aid. Public code equations, implemented transparently, with the factor and allowable data supplied by the engineer running them. Results must be independently verified and reviewed by a qualified engineer before any design, fabrication, or operating decision — the same standard any calculation from any source is held to.
The company behind it
Piping Toolset is operated by Flexible Piping Solutions LLC, a company registered in Missouri, USA. Calculator inputs never leave your browser; there is no account requirement on the free tier and nothing to cancel. Questions, corrections, and disagreements about a calculation are all welcome at support@pipingtoolset.com — a reported wrong number is treated as a defect, reproduced as a fixture case, and recorded in the calculation changelog.