Back to Working with Inclination Data
Sections
Review the Results in WinCan VX
To load the inclination graph in WinCan VX, click on the inclination launcher button in the lower-left corner of the WinCan VX user interface, or click on the inclination button in the ‘Extended Modules’ ribbon. The button in the lower-left corner of the user interface is dynamic in that it is greyed out unless you have a section in the section list highlighted that has an inclination test, so if there is no inclination test on this section, then the button is not active.
Launching the inclination panel.
Immediately you will see the data for the test on the current inspection. maybe you have done two or more inspections of the pipe and several inclination tests? There can only be one inclination test attached to one inspections, so in this case, you must select the inspection that you wish to review the inclination test for, or use the navigation buttons inside the inclination panel.
There is a whole lot of information going on here which all needs to be understood to get the best out of the inclination module!
Understanding the basic presented data.
The pipe ID is shown in the top-left of the inclination panel along with the date and time of the inspection that is currently in view.
In this example, the test has been done from the upstream end and has been done forwards, so the total length of the pipe which is in the pipe header information can be seen on the lower right hand end of the x axis of the graph, so it goes from left to right, 0 m to 23 m. If this example had an inclination test done from the other end, then 23 would be on the left and zero would be on the right, because the measurement points are always measured from the end where the CCTV truck is located, regardless of the inclination test direction.
The upstream manhole is plotted on the left side of the graph, always. This is independent of the inspection direction or the inclination test direction as has been described previously.
The downstream manhole is plotted on the right side, always.
The pipe diameter can be seen on the graph by the distance between the two sloping brown lines. These lines represent the ‘perfect’ line of the pipe at its invert (the bottom of the pipe) and at its crown (the top of the pipe), so by looking at the scale on the left side of the graph, we can see the difference between 2.2 and 1.9 is 0.3 m which is the diameter of the pipe in the section header.
The inclination curve is always draw from the end where the CCTV truck is placed, so the blue curve is either drawn from left to right or right to left based on the inspection and inclination directions, but the starting altitude is taken from the section header data. In this example, the pipe depth at the upstream end is 2.2 m, so this is the starting point for all the following points as the test is carried out and the camera goes down the pipe.
Notice the key above the upstream manhole ID on the graph. This describes the lines that you can see - the thick blue curve and the thin brown lines of the pipe.
Notice the key above the downstream manhole ID on the graph which shows that the green arrow above the centre of the graph shows the CCTV inspection direction and the blue arrow shows the inclination test direction. These two directions are mutually exclusive from each other.
In the bottom right corner we see the ‘Measured distance’. This is not the length of the pipe or the length of the inspection. It is the length of the inclination test which is not necessarily the same as the other length values and is also independent of the other lengths. So, in this example, the inclination test does not quite cover all of the pipe (21.75 ÷ 23 = 0.95 or 95 %) so only 95 % of the pipe was tested in the inclination test. There is no shame in this value, it is quite normal for these lengths to not quite align, but in perfect conditions, the values should be as close as possible.
In the top left quadrant of the panel there are number of user options which can affect what is shown on the report (more on these later), the calculated delta height (fall) value, the calculated gradient value and a printing button which will print the currently displayed graph. Note - the inclination charts can also be printed from the printing control panel, with the same results, but the difference there is that all of the graphs from the project will be printed, not just the currently selected graph.
In the top right quadrant there are some navigation buttons to view the next/previous inclination test in the project and a delete button which will delete the current test from the project, and then above these controls (not indicated on the image above), there are a lot of user controls that affect the ouput which we will go into more detail later.
Extended Options
So, the first time we launch the inclination panel, we see no view options selected, like this:
Standard default inclination panel view.
The first available user option is ‘Display Inclination Curve’, which gives us this view:
Display inclination curve option.
This option adds a 2nd line to the graph and a new scale on the right side for reading this curve against. This thin line is a plot of the actual data points that have been collected by the camera during the test and is not the shape of the pipe. This is displayed by the thick blue line.
Notice that the scale on the right has its zero point somewhere near the middle of the vertical axis, because as we already know, sometimes the camera is pointing up (positive inclination data points) and sometimes it is pointing down (negative inclination data points), but on balance, there will be a majority or an average of either negative or positive which will tell us that the pipe is falling in the expected direction.
See in this example that most (not all) of this line is below zero, so the camera was generally going downhill, which is what we would expect from a downstream inspection. has we tested exactly the same pipe from the other end, the graph would roughly be flipped about its horizontal axis (turned upside down), because the camera would have generally been going uphill, but the shape of the thick blue line would not change, because we are always sticking to the intuitive convention of always presenting the curve in the downstream direction.
When the inclination curve crosses the zero vertical axis point, then the camera is dead level, and if you look carefully at where this happens, the thick blue line is flat at this point. Where the thin curve is positive, the thick line is going up and where it is negative the tick blue line is going down.
The next user option is ‘Smooth Inclination’:
Smooth Inclination option.
This user option smooths out the curve to make it look ‘nicer’. It also adds the translated text ‘(Smoothed)’ to the chart title because this option could be used to make the pipe look better than it really is, and customers might be unhappy to see this, particularly in Sweden.
The 3rd user option is 'Show Gridlines:
‘Show Gridlines’ option.
This turns on the graph paper background for the chart which can be useful for taking measurements against the horizontal and vertical scales of the two graphs.
Of course, the user can turn on any combination of these three options or all three if they wish:
Multiple options selected.
The ‘Save Graph’ button allows the user to save the chart with its current display in a number of user friendly graphics file formats for use in external applications.
The ‘Show Data’ button gives us a pop up with all of the data points for this test. This is very useful for diagnosing problems, and can also be used to delete individual points:
Show Data panel.
The 3 columns displayed here are:
The measurement point number.
The distance measurement for this point in metres or feet.
The attitude measurement for this point in %
It is clear to see from this data if the test was done with the camera going forwards or backwards. In a forwards test, the distance will increase as the counter increases, and in a backwards test it will decrease as the counter increases.
The multi-select tool with the small green tick in the lower left corner is used to activate the checkboxes against the measurement points where the user can delete selected points. This is useful when there are some bad points in the data, almost always within the metre closest to the CCTV truck because of the effect of the cable tugging the back of the camera unit upwards into the manhole as has been described previously.
The Print button simply create a single sheet printout of the current chart with the user options that are currently selected in the inclination panel. More about printing later.
This example shows us a ‘Delta Altitude’ of -0.09 m and a ‘Measured Inc.’ of -0.41 %
These are calculated from the received data points and are good values that describe a ‘happy’ drain that is flowing the right way.