Structural Design and Analysis of Safety Enclosure for Testing of High Pressure Equipment

Abstract

In present scenario high pressure equipment like pumps, valves, gas boosters, intensifiers, cylinders, pipes, etc. are widely used in heavy engineering industries. Testing of these equipment are essential before going to general use. During the testing of equipment there are chances of structural failure which causes the damage to humans and the surrounding environment with in the plant. Therefore during testing it is recommended to use the safety enclosure which can resist the major effect of structural failure. This dissertation deals with the structural design and analysis of safety enclosure in which testing can be done. Due to failure, the exploded projectile from equipment strike on the wall with impact force over a short period of time. The impact force was numerically calculated based on experimental data and verified with the measured value. In this dissertation the material selection, impact load calculation, load distribution on wall, plate thickness calculation, beam selection and beam design calculation, fasteners calculation, bearing calculation have been carried out based on fundamentals of structural design and guidelines given in Indian Standard. The structure is highly depend on plate and beam strength under bending and shear loading. 3D solid model of safety enclosure is prepared with the help of structural parts and sub-assemblies in CAD software. Structural analysis is carried out using FEA simulation package. It is observed that all components which are designed from numerical calculation is safe and it shows good agreement with FE result. In addition, the proper welding sequence has been proposed for stiffened wall to reduce residual stress and welding distortion with the help of empirical welding rules.