Fixed Plant Equipment Protection
Process requirements and costs determine the location of equipment. Piping and instrumentation are then used to provide the much needed the connectivity and communication between the fixed equipment in the plant. Piping includes pipe, flanges, fittings, bolting, gaskets, valves, and the pressure containing portions of other piping components. It also includes pipe hangers and supports and other items necessary to prevent over-pressurisation and over-stressing of the pressure-containing components. It is evident that pipe is one element or a part of piping. Therefore, pipe sections when joined with fittings, valves, and other mechanical equipment and properly supported by hangers and supports, are called piping. The need cost effective plant layout and compact designs drives the need for piping flexibility considerations at the design stage. More importantly, all equipment in a plant a by necessity designed and built to a standard, which specifies limits to the loads at nozzles for the piping to other equipment. This is helpful to the piping engineer in deciding the piping route. There are a number of good beam-mode finite element digital computer based methods for piping flexibility assessment. These vary in costs should a piping department decide to procure one of these. However, there are also structural mechanics approaches such the 'Guided Cantilever' methods that is readily programmed using a spreadsheet that the piping engineer can use before final confirmatory model using one of the various pipe stress proprietary commercial programs. The following guided cantilever graphs are from Kelloggs Engineering Design. A limited version of the guided cantilever method of piping flexibility calculation is also available Piping Handbook.
Pipe Support Manufacturer
