flotools 1.4 represents a major improvement in plot viewing and editing that addresses a number of pain points and feedback items we’ve received over the past few months. We’ve carefully redesigned the experience to make it easier than ever for flow assurance engineers to create and export report-ready plots. This post describes the following significant improvements made in flotools 1.4:
- Surge Volume plot type
- Plot Gallery
- WYSIWYG Plot Editing
- Points of Interest
- New Annotation Types and Options
Surge Volume plot type
flotools 1.4 introduces a new plot type that helps flow assurance engineers perform slugging analysis and surge tank design calculations. The Surge Volume plot type calculates the maximum surge volume across a range of drain rates using the ACCLIQ, ACCOIQ, and ACCWAQ variables.
flotools uses the following equation to calculate surge volumes given an ACC* variable:
You can watch an introductory video here (password required).
Plot Gallery
flotools 1.4 introduces a new navigation feature called the plot gallery that helps flow assurance engineers quickly switch between plots in a dashboard and create a new plot without returning to the dashboard view.
WYSIWYG Plot Editing
One of the pain points we heard early and often about the annotations feature in flotools was that it was difficult to visualize what the final plot would look like when you export it. The annotations would move to new positions when exported because the size of viewed plot was different than the size of the exported plot:
Before
In flotools 1.4 we’ve redesigned the plot viewing experience to exactly match what the plot will look like when exported. Any changes you make to the plot when viewing it in flotools, including adding annotations or changing the plot style, will be displayed exactly the same as when they are exported.
After
Points of Interest
flotools 1.4 introduces a new “Points of Interest” feature that replaces and improves upon the Layers feature in past versions. The old layers panel has been removed in favor of a Points of Interest section at the top of the Annotations panel. The points of interest are determined by reading the input file for the series plotting on the graph. The section will not appear if no points of interest are found for the plot.
Clicking the eyeball shows a preview of all of the points available for that particular layer.
Clicking the check box will add snap points to the plot. Once snap points are added you can snap any annotation to those snap points. If you add a horizontal line, vertical line, or text box annotation to the plot by click on one of the snap points, the text of the annotation will take the text of the layer.
New Annotation Types and Options
flotools 1.4 includes three new annotation types and many new formatting options to help you create professional plots:
- Image, Series Highlight, and Series Area annotations
- Annotations can be set to a value on a secondary Y axis
- Annotations can be reordered
- Font size, style, and color options are available on all annotations with text
- Three different arrowhead styles are available for line annotations
- Lines can be snapped to images and text boxes
We hope you enjoy the many improvements in this release! You can view the release notes for a list of all fixes and improvements included in flotools 1.4.