Summary Outline/sheet for pipe stress analysis

[Patassa]

Hello,

Straight out of school I went into the refinery world as a maintenance engineer where I dealt very little with any type of analysis besides some back of the envelope checks. I'm now in a design firm and have projects that will require the use of Cesear/etc pipe stress analysis. We have a guy that will probably handle that as I don't have the time to be trained on the software, however what I'm looking for is to see if you guys that are more experience or familiar with the stress analysis world know of any short summaries or sheets out there that contain all the major stress types and their equations? I'd like to be familiar with what the software is using to come up with the outputs, or at least be competent in all the different stresses to talk the talk when pressed.

I feel like I need to brush up on Mechanics of Materials and Fluid Dynamics but going through my old college textbooks and trying to find the applicable parts to piping design (and some vessels) seems really inefficient.

Thanks for anything you can provide.

I'm familiar with ASME 31.3 and Sec. 8 for pressure vessels, I'm looking for more theory and explanation of the different types of stresses.

 

[SNORGY]

This is now "THE" book on the subject matter:

https://www.asme.org/products/books/pipe-stress-engineering

L.C. Peng's website also has some pretty good technical papers that wouldbe of benefit.

Charles Becht IV also has published very useful reference material in this area.

If you are looking to really get into the theory behind stress and stress states, Timoshenko is probably still the gold standard.

 

[LittleInch]

I view Stress analysis the same as Flow asusrance/ hydraulic analysis. The basics are fairly simple - metal expands and contracts and gets stressed due to various things - pressure, temperature, external forces and calculations exist that calculate the combined inpact of that for various pressure and temperature combinations. I don't need to know the deep theory or the precise calcualtion, what I need to do is make sure that the analyst has used the correct input (and learning how to check the input file print out is probably a key skill you need to learn), give the output a sense check and then try to find a low cost "cure" for the areas which are over stressed or avoid them in the first place. The number of times a stress issue has been "solved" by reviewing the inputs and using the correct values for your project as opposed to the last one or shaving a few "conservative" inputs is quite high.

Alowing even a very small amount of movement compared to a fixed anchor can often solve many issues, suggesting use of low friction supports, constant load suppots, hangers etc, allowing some flexibility in the layout and taking key information from the outputs (amount of x,y and z movmeent and forces) for use elsewhere in the design is probably what you need to do.

Think about whether you really need to know the theory or not, but if you do SNORGY has given you some great looking ideas.

My motto: Learn something new every day

Also: There's usually a good reason why everyone does it that way

 

[Patassa]

Thank you, men. I'll consider what I really need and look into those options.