When designing a new plant, a piping engineer has to make sure that loads imposed by piping on attached equipment does not reach certain limits. Normally, rotating equipment and vessel nozzles are considered possible weak links and thus closely watched. However, valves also need a certain degree of attention, especially when not using flanged connections.
Piping loads are rarely sufficient to cause a catastrophic failure in the valve – earthquakes are a possibility – but they may be enough to hinder valve operation or cause internal leakage. In this article, we are going to introduce the basics of piping engineering and how it impacts valves.
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