PiPe Stress engineering by Liang-Chuan (L.C.) Peng and tsen-Loong (Alvin) Peng Peng engineering, Houston, texas, USA

PiPe Stress engineering by Liang-Chuan (L.C.) Peng and tsen-Loong (Alvin) Peng Peng engineering, Houston, texas, USA

PREFACE

It may be a bit surprising that designing a piping system is so involved. Indeed, on a large project, not

only is every discipline required, but the effort also engages quite a few people. Piping design and pip

ing mechanical are the two disciplines that require the most number of personnel. However, for a small project handled by a small outfit, generally only one or two people are assigned to take care of all the work of various disciplines. In such cases, pipe stress activity is often neglected. Due to the resilient na ture of ductile piping systems, the piping will work most of the time, even without going through proper stress checks. This may be acceptable for small non-hazardous piping, but not for most of public and industrial piping systems, which require the piping system to be safe and operational all the time. Item (5) is the main subject of this book. The task of a piping mechanical engineer is generally called pipe stress and support. The scope of the pipe stress and support activity has increased exponentially in the past three decades. This is due to the stringent requirements of the modern plant. For instance, in the 1960s, the pipe stress and support manpower used for a petrochemical plant was about 4000 man-hours. A nuclear power plant in that era would have used about the same amount of pipe stress man-hours. Nowadays, the pipe stress and support manpower required for a petrochemical plant has increased by ten times to about 50,000 man-hours. The effort required by a nuclear power plant has grown 1000-fold to reach as high as 2 million man-hours [2]. With this exponential growth in the man hours involved, the probability of getting sub-standard output from some of the engineers is very high. A time-saving tool, such as an efficient pipe stress computer program, not only significantly reduces the cost of designing a plant, but also greatly improves the quality of the plant. Good work starts with a good grasp of the scope of the jobs that need to be done. In this chapter, the non-mathematical concepts of pipe stress activities will be discussed.

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