Liquid Rocket Plumbing and Instrumentation Diagram: Standards and Presentation

Question

I'm working on a team to build a liquid sounding rocket as a school project. We need to present our plumbing and instrumentation diagram, but we are butting heads on what program and standards we should utilize to make the PID more readable.

Is there any strategies we can use to improve readability and represent different 'flow states' that the plumbing system can provide? Are there any good examples of P&ID diagrams that we should reference for rocketry specifically? Is there an industry standard tool we can buy for relativity cheap?

Answer 1

The term is piping and instrumentation diagramm, though plumbing sounds cute. I've never done rocket science so maybe there's conventions I'm not aware of here, but I often work with P&ID in plant design.

MS Visio has been used for P&ID drafting (Maybe the 90 day free trial period is enough for your project), there's also the free tool Diag from the openoffice or libreoffice family. Both should have a symbol library for ASME (US American codes) P&ID symbols, maybe also for ISO (rest of the world) ones.

To represent different flow states, you can print the P&ID several times, mark the valves and gates as open or closed and highlight the lines that carry medium. You see this done in professional contexts too.