AN OVERVIEW OF STRESS ANALYSIS OF HIGH-ENERGY PIPELINE SYSTEMS USED IN THERMAL POWER PLANTS

A typical high-energy piping systems consists of the main steam, reheat (hot and cold) and boiler feed pump (BFP).The initial design of the system is based on elastic analysis to ensure that the stresses and deflections fall within established code limits.The important reason for analyzing the piping is that many power plants were built before (40 to 50 years) computer analysis techniques were available.The main aim of piping stress analysis is to check the design, which will allow simple and economical piping supports and provide flexibility to the piping system for thermal expansion.The piping stress analysis is carried out using CAEPIPE software.By using this software we can evaluate stresses, stress ratios, flange condition, support loads, element forces and displacements at each node.In this paper, only the maximum and minimum displacement results are tabulated.