Chapter 1 through Chapter 7 covers the basics of piping and plant design including piping components, valves, supports and fabrication drawings. The intent being to give the reader the ability to interpret piping arrangement drawings, equipment drawings, specifications, instrumentation and subsequently be able to produce isometrics of piping systems as well as the documentation and BOM’s required to facilitate the fabrication of same.
Chapter 8 through Chapter 17 will familiarize engineers, designers and construction personnel with layout and design procedures as well as practices involved in the location of equipment and sizing and layout of piping systems. An introduction into piping stress analysis is covered in Chapter 18 and Chapter 19 covers pipe sizing and pressure drop calculations.
ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) piping codes were developed in the early 1900’s to provide rules and guidelines for designers and constructors of power boilers and since then have been expanded to include different areas of piping design.
Requirements and practices vary from industry to industry and even the ASME codes do not offer too much guidance on piping layout practices.
The utilization of CAD (Computer Aided Drafting) and CAE (Computer Aided Engineering) software programs in the plant design area has changed the requirements that an employer has when hiring a new employee. It now is important to be computer literate in addition to having a mechanical aptitude and sketching and drafting skills. CAD/CAE has not, however, eliminated the need to have a good understanding of piping detail and design.
Like all branches of engineering there are right ways and wrong ways of doing things and the area of piping design is no different, in fact there is always more than one way acceptable way to route a pipe. Different industries i.e. power, petrochemical, mining, steel etc. have their own priorities which dictate how a pipe is routed, this book shall adopt the petrochemical approach, which, while it may be rather stringent for some areas of piping, gives the student a solid understanding of the basic rules involved in this field.
The area of piping is an extremely challenging one in which you are always learning and even an engineer/designer with years of experience cannot possibly know everything about everything. The only way to become competent is to gain as much varied experience as is possible and discipline yourself to improving your piping and plant design knowledge.
Included with the book is a compact disc containing Autocad files of all sketches, drawings and solutions to problems.
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