Design and stress evaluation of a nonsymmetric pressure vessel

Presently, the large variation in demand for electrical power at different periods of the day imposes new considerations in the evaluation of pressure components in large steam-generating equipment. In the past, pressure components such as valve bodies have been designed for static pressure conditions against bursting with sufficient stiffness to assure operation ability. In today's plant operation, the response of the valve body to thermal transients will have a major influence on the life of the valve. Since the valve body is a compact nonsymmetric body, the direct calculation of stresses is very complex. The evaluation of the behavior of nonsymmetric pressure components under the loads imposed by various operational modes requires information from both analytical and experimental methods of analysis. The contributions from modern computer-calculation programs and three-dimensional photoelasticity are discussed as applied to the evaluation of a valve body used in a large, supercritical steam generator. In the analysis, computer procedures are used to develop the preliminary geometry for pressure loading. Because of the close proximity of the nonsymmetrical openings, a three-dimensional photoelastic analysis is used to calibrate the computer model. Once a satisfactory computer model has been developed for pressure loading, it is used to calculate the thermal stresses. Since stresses have little meaning in themselves, a design basis is necessary to evaluate the significance of the calculated stresses. The design basis must consider the types of failures which are possible and is thus dependent on the temperature at which the valve must operate. A design basis is discussed for the evaluation of pressure components in a boiler system.