Opening in Tall Heavy Cylinder

[Matthew_Engineer]

Hello, have an empty steel cylinder 2.6m diameter, approx 50m tall with 25mm wall. It's a piece of process plant. Need to cut an opening near base of cylinder approx 1000 x 1500mm. There is approx 90Te dead weight above the opening. Do you think I need to reinforce hole to support dead weight, prevent bucking or other fairly catastrophic failure modes? There is mo conventional hoop stress as cylinder is empty.
Appreciate your thought! Matthew.

 

[JStephen]

Calculate the required thickness to support the loads in question (based on axial compression), then see if the excess plate thickness around the hole is adequate to reinforce the opening. From the description, it sounds like it would be no problem, but that's how you'd confirm.

 

[LittleInch]

That sounds like a fairly big hole to me.

What is the shape and which of those dimensions are vertical and circumferential?

You also need to consider bending and moments as I guess this is some sort of chimney?, hence subject to wind loading etc.

Sounds a bit like an FEA job to me but I can't see how you can really just cut out this sort of size hole without some decent re-inforcement.


we have about 5% of the required information here....

Remember - More details = better answers
Also: If you get a response it's polite to respond to it.

 

[MJCronin]

This sounds a lot like the evaluation of the exhaust gas hole in a thin steel stack.

Everyone I have seen has had a frame reinforcement

Find the calculation method contained in ASME STS-1–2006, the design guideline for steel stacks.

MJCronin
Sr. Process Engineer