Assign Cost Libraries Panel

If Monetary Cost is selected as the Objective, the costs of any components considered in the Objective must be available.

Note: For an accurate analysis, costs are required for any component that may be considered in sizing. This means that it is not sufficient to have cost data only for some pipe sizes, or only for certain sized junctions. Every pipe Size and Type considered in a given Candidate Set needs to have cost information for every parameter considered in the Objective.

Cost and Energy Libraries

Libraries are not discussed in detail here. Both Cost and Energy Libraries are available as a part of the base application. For a thorough explanation see Cost Overview and the associated topics. The Cooling System - Creating Libraries - ANS is an excellent place to start if you are unfamiliar with Cost Libraries.

Assigning Cost Libraries

Candidate Sets can have any number of Cost Libraries assigned to them (Figure 1). This can be useful as different sources of costs can be distributed among several libraries. For example, different Sizes of pipes may be available only from certain manufacturers, and splitting libraries by material source can provide clarity.

Likewise, Installation cost mat have several sub-component costs such as Shipment and Labor. In these cases, There would be an Installation cost for the same Material, Size and Type in two different libraries. Including both of these libraries will use the sum of the two costs in the Objective.

The Assign Cost Database section of the ANS module.

Figure 1: Candidate sets can have multiple Cost Libraries assigned to them

Note: Keep in mind when assigning cost libraries that the automated sizing will consider the sum of costs from all selected cost libraries. Be careful to include multiple libraries only if every cost would be incurred. Do not include, for example, two cost libraries comparing costs from two different suppliers.

Modifying Cost Calculations

Multipliers on a given cost category for a given component can be applied here. These are useful in a variety of situations. A pump may be in a difficult to access location, driving up its maintenance cost by some factor. Or, a control valve may only operate a percentage of the time, meaning that less cost is required for maintenance. A pipe that must be buried would have a higher installation cost. There are many such examples where a specific pipe or junction in the system has a higher or lower cost than the value defined in the library.

Note: Multipliers can also be applied within cost libraries. The multipliers are independent of each other and stack multiplicatively.

If recurring costs are considered, there will be an additional column in this table titled Service Duration. By default, recurring costs are considered for the entire System Life. If certain components should only be considered as incurring cost for part of the System Life, this can be defined here.

Modify Cost Calculations On Pumps section of the ANS module.

Figure 2: The Multipliers and Service Duration fields allow for modification of the library cost