Greetings,

I have a vertical shell & tube heat exchanger. The design of the hex is a 10" nozzle, a reducer, a 20" section of pipe, another reducer, and a 10" nozzle.

Of course, the two nozzles are connected to one another by a tube bundle, and the shell itself has two nozzles to supply cooling media to the tube bundle.

While I'm confident that the two shell nozzles can be simply solved with WRC-107/297 calculations, the process fluid nozzles concern me.

When prompted for allowable loads, the vendor supplied WRC-107 calculations, which from the description of WRC-107 provided, do not apply.

My thought processes are:

1) Treat it as pipe - if it passes pipe stress analysis, the nozzle itself won't fail.
2) Use the WRC-107 numbers as they are inherently safer to use, as they take into account the discontinuity between pressure vessel and nozzle.

But neither of these actually address what happens to the tube bundles within the vessel.

Does anyone know which direction to look for documentation on true maximum allowable loads on a nozzle like this?

Thanks for reading,
Michael Fletcher