Stress of Large Diameter Piping System Shoe Support

As codes and standards employ the beam theory to evaluate stress in piping systems, large diameter piping is therefore outside the domain of these codes and standards. To investigate any failure modes in these piping systems, more general codes such as ASME Sec. VIII Div.2 must be used. Research has shown that estimating local stress is important near the shoe support tip especially for large diameter piping systems and aboveground pipelines. To evaluate protection against local failure under an applied design load, a more accurate estimation method of ASME Sec. VIII Div.2, part 5 is applied by using elastic-plastic stress analysis procedures. For this purpose, finite element analysis is carried out along with distributed gravity loading and design pressure. Furthermore, parametric FEA studies are conducted on the effect of the ratio of pipe diameter to thickness, as well as the width and wrap angle of shoe support on the local stress of shoe support. The FEA results have been compared to semi-empirical formula for local stress in shoe support developed by AWWA standard.