FEA on Tube Supports (Fired Heaters)

[unoerudite]

Hello all

I was recently doing an FE analysis on the Convection section Tube Support. My question is when we are doing the analysis, do we need to account for the thermal loading separately or can it be skipped since we already found the dead load (from API 530) based on the temperature the support is subjected to.

Please let me know if you want me to be more descriptive.

Thank you all for your valuable time and opinion.

Regards
PP

 

[flash3780]

Is the temperature uniform? Nonuniform thermal loading can be difficult to evaluate with hand calculations. I'm not familiar with the geometry of petroleum heater tubes, but I'd imagine that you'll want to consider variations in material properties due to thermal loads, even if the reaction loads in your model can be determined with high confidence.