A COMPARISON STUDY OF PIPING LOADS EFFECT ON SUPPORT/FOUNDATION FOR ELASTIC AND RIGID VERTICAL VESSELS

摘要

Modern petrochemical and chemical facilities consist of a significant number of pressure vessels. Adequate design of pressure vessels and their foundations have a significant impact on the safety and economics of such facilities. The design of pressure envelope components is well developed and specified in pressure vessel codes. A more less developed but significant aspect of the design of pressure vessels is the design of the vessel support and foundation. To adequately design the vessel support/foundation, engineers shall consider all the applicable loads on the vessel from attached piping and determine whether these loads could potentially entirely translate to the vessel base support/foundation. While methodology to determine these piping loads is well developed in literature and codes, there is a lack of guidance on how to determine the effect of these piping loads on the base support/foundation loading. This paper is a continuation of the paper presented at the PVP2016 conference (63694 "Effects of Piping Loads on Vessel Supports and foundation" [1]), where the effect of piping loads on a vessel support/foundation was discussed. The paper demonstrated that when flexibility was introduced into a simple piping system, the loads transferred to the foundation/supports were reduced. This paper expands the study by evaluating piping loads from a more complex piping system attached to a tall vessel. To observe the differences, two different vessel heights and three different shell thicknesses are evaluated. The effect of piping loads (loading at the base) is calculated when the vessel and the nozzles are considered rigid and when flexibilities are introduced into the system. The more flexibility is introduced into the system, the more reduction in base loads is observed.