Analysis and Design of Steel Pipe Rack - Superstructure

Abstract

Petrochemical facilities have structures such as pipe rack, office building, steel shelters, and equipment support structure. Selection of structural steel pipe rack is done for study, as pipe racks are there in all types of industries for carrying pipe lines, electrical cable trays, PSV’s etc.

Petrochemical plant layout for particular capacity is generalized and if another plant of same capacity is to construct at different location, than attempt is made that same layout can be used. As capacity and layout of plant are kept same than piping loads also remains same, the only change is in topography, which affects the design in respect of variation in wind speed and seismic zone. In majority of steel pipe racks as they are open frame structures, wind load with combination of piping load is governing, so here attempt is made to study effect of different wind speeds on pipe rack to develop template to start with preliminary design.

This report includes introduction to structural pipe racks, which further explains classification of pipe rack, applications of pipe rack, different loading and design considerations. To understand behaviour of pipe rack under different loads, one pipe rack having span of 48 m with five tiers and seven bays at spacing of 8m each has been model in STAAD Pro software, Different loading such as dead load (fireproofing, cable tray), live load, piping load (empty, test, operating condition), wind load and seismic load are applied. Analysis and Design has been carried out using Indian Standards.

In this piece of work, an attempt is made to study the behavior of structural steel pipe rack with structural modification which includes variation in section, using different bracing patterns such as K- Bracing, Knee bracing, diagonal bracing.