Design Automation of Nozzle Reinforcement Analysis For Pressure Vessel

Abstract

Pressure Vessels are used in different applications such as in distillation towers, re- fineries, petrochemical industries and reactors. In pressure vessel opening are made to accommodate manholes, handholds and nozzles .

Opening in pressure vessel may be circular, rectangular and elliplitical. As opening is provided in nozzle, so as per asme code area replacement method, area of additional material is required to be added at least equal to the area removed by opening in shell of minimum thickness. While designing of different types of forging nozzles and flange on head and shell as per ASME CODE SECTION VIII DIV 2 2010 EDITION, reinforcement calculation is always taken into consideration.

At the time of enquiry of any project, it was found that time taken by estimator for estimating cost of nozzle is 4 to 5 days because estimation team may not able to estimate weight of nozzle until design of different nozzles and modeling of nozzles may not be prepared by designers and cad engineers.

While designing of flange, if standard size of flange is available in ASME CODE 16.5 and 16.47 then standard data is taken from code for designing, otherwise design of flange should be done as per ASME CODE SECTION VIII DIV 2 clause (4.15) and non standard database has been developed for nozzles size having more then 12” for 2500 rating. In order to reduce time to get estimated weight, automation of nozzle reinforcement calculation and modeling of nozzle drawing have been created in solid edge software using visual basic programming.

After entering the specific input in input form of macro, design calculation of nozzle has been carried out in visual basic program. Designed data of nozzle is been de- veloped and optimized designed data has been used for generating drawing in solid edge. The developed macro has been used to in reducing the to has been used to display the weight of the nozzle in drawing itself . The developed automation macro program helps in reducing the time to calculated the weight of the nozzle at time of enquiry.