Aquaveo & Water Resources Engineering News

The 2019 Aquaveo User Conference is going on now. It started yesterday, October 8th, and will wrap up today, October 9th. We are enjoying meeting with users from around the world. In attendance are users from the United States, Germany, Portugal, South Africa, and other places around the globe.

At the conference, we announced some of the new features and upcoming changes to our products that we are excited about:

• Making XMS functionality available for use outside of the traditional interface.
• More web-based applications for portability and ease of access.
• Simplifying and unifying tools so it is easier to find and use the functionalities available.
• Project management tools to track the history of a model.
• 3D bridge modeling in SMS.

Talking to those in attendance, we learned they enjoyed:

• Learning more about software features and functionality.
• Learning how to improve their model development process.
• Discovering benefits of Aquaveo’s software over other software.
• Talking to developers and learning tips for model development.
• Being able to show off their models and receive feedback on them.

We’d like the thank the following for participating during our user conference:

• Scott Hogan with the Federal Highway Administration
• Scott Kudlas with the Office of Water Supply, Virginia Dept. of Environmental Quality
• Eva Loch with Hydrotec
R. Jeffrey Davis with Barr Engineering
• Andrea Borgia with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
• Yazmin Avila with the City of Austin Watershed Protection Division
• Young-Hoon Jin with the City of Austin Watershed Protection Division
• Antonio Trigo-Teixeira with the Instituto Superior Tecnico, University of Lisbon
• Rute Ramos from the Laboratorio Nacional de Engenharia Civil
• Eric Miller with GeoEngineers
• Mitch Brown with the Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory, U.S. Army Corps. Of Engineers
• Chris Massey with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

If you couldn’t make it to the Aquaveo User Conference this year, watch our website and Facebook page for future conferences.

The Aquaveo XMS Wiki contains over 8000 pages of information and images about SMS, GMS, WMS, and other Aquaveo products (collectively called "XMS"). While we try to make the information as easy to find as possible, sometimes the sheer volume of available information can make a particular search term harder to locate. Here, we discuss a few ways to find the information you need using the XMS Wiki.

Help Button

Most dialogs in SMS, GMS, and WMS contain a Help button at the bottom of the dialog window. Clicking this button will generally take you directly to a page on the XMS Wiki about that dialog. This is the quickest way to find information about a dialog.

Navigation Links

When you visit any page on the XMS Wiki, an "XMS Projects" menu is found at the top left of the page. Click on any of the products listed there to be taken to the main page for that product. Once there, click on any of the links in the Wiki Sections section on the lower right to be taken to a table of contents listing all of the pages discussing the features of that product.

At the bottom of the main page for the product, there is also a navigation template listing main topics for that product. This allows you to quickly navigate to any of those main topics.

Search Field

Directly below the "XMS Projects" menu is a search field. If you start typing in that field, the XMS Wiki will attempt to locate a page containing what you type. To find a page about a particular product, preface the search term with that product's abbreviation, followed by a colon and the search term. For example, if you are searching for information about the bridge scour features in SMS, type "SMS:Bridge Scour" and a list of articles will appear below the search box. Simply select the desired article to be taken directly to it.

You can also enter only the search term and select the "containing…searchterm", where "searchterm" is the term you entered in the search box. This will bring up a list of pages containing the term you entered. This can be useful when you don't know what the page might be named, but you know a term that might be used on that page.

Categories

At the bottom of every page on the XMS Wiki is a list of one or more categories. This provides another way to locate information on a given topic. Simply click on the category to find a list of pages, images, and additional categories related to that topic.

Google

One option that is often overlooked is to use the power of the Google search engine. To search for pages or information on the XMS Wiki, enter "searchterm site:xmswiki.com", replacing "searchterm" with the word or words you are seeking. This tells Google to provide results only from the XMS Wiki. Click this link for an example.

Page Prefixes

Most pages on the XMS Wiki are prefaced by a product abbreviation. When reviewing search results, make sure the page you are on has the appropriate abbreviation at the beginning of the page title (e.g., "SMS:Display Options", "GMS:Display Options", "WMS:Display Options"), as similar pages may be found for various products.

Page Notices

Sometimes when searching for information or a feature, you may find pages that document obsolete or future features. These pages will have notices at the top indicating this status. There are other types of notices that may appear at the tops of pages, as well, so always be sure to read any notices that appear.

Try out these search methods today by visiting the XMS Wiki today!

Have you experienced setting display options for an unstructured grid only to see those settings not take? In GMS, each unstructured grid (UGrid) uses its own set of display options. A common reason for display settings not appearing is selecting the wrong UGrid when you have multiple UGrids.

Changing the UGrid display settings will only affect one UGrid at a time. So it is important to make certain the correct UGrid display options are being changed.

There are three ways to reach the Display Options dialog for UGrids:

• Display Options macro
• Display Options command in the Display menu
• Display Options command in the UGrid Data right-click menu in the Project Explorer

Once in the Display Options dialog, check to see which UGrid is active. This is done by looking a the list on the left side of the dialog. The list on the left will indicate which By default, the display option will be set for the active UGrid. So one method to make certain you are setting display options for the correct UGrid, it to make certain that UGrid is the active UGrid in the Project Explorer before entering the Display Options dialog.

The Display Options dialog can be used to change display settings for a UGrid that is not active. This is done by selecting the desired UGrid from the list on the left in the dialog. It should be noted that selecting a UGrid in th Display Options dialog does not cause the UGrid to become the active UGrid in GMS. So when you exit the Display Options dialog, you may need to change which UGrid is active in the Project Explorer to see the display setting changes.

It should be noted that which UGrid is active also matters when accessing the Dataset Contours Options dialog.

Hopefully, this helps clarify how to set display options in projects that have multiple UGrids. Make use of Ugrids disaply options in you project using GMS today!

Starting in SMS 13.0, there is a new paving option for 2D meshes.

Paving and other mesh types, such as patching, determine the shape and size of elements (cells) when generating 2D meshes. These options are set on polygons in the Map module using the 2D Mesh Polygon Properties dialog.

Using the correct mesh type can have a large impact on your project. A good mesh type will create the correct shape and size of the mesh elements that model the physical features accurately. Selecting the wrong mesh type can add needless complexity to your mesh and cause errors in the model run.

Previous mesh type methods included patch, paving, and scalar paving density.

The pave meshing method fills a mesh polygon with equilateral, triangular elements. The new constant paving density uses the same approach as paving, but with an added component of a size and bias specified for each polygon. Size controls the target element size, while bias controls how quickly the elements transition to that size.

The following image shows the effects of changing the size and bias for a 100 x 200 rectangular mesh, with arc spacing of 5.

It should be noted that the above are merely examples to demonstrate the effect of changes in the size and bias values. For smooth transition of element size, it is recommended that the bias value be less than 0.3. Having element sizes that change too quickly can significantly impact the model run results.

As always, it is a good idea to perform a mesh quality check on the final mesh before including the mesh in your model. If problems are found in the mesh, adjust your size and bias setting then regenerate the mesh.

With the options available for mesh types, these tools should give you what you need to make the perfect mesh for your projects. Try the constant paving density option in SMS today!