BUILDING EXPANSION JOINT DISPLACEMENT

Dear experts,

I am doing stress analysis for Building piping (Chilled water supply and return piping) project for Caesar II software.

Here building expansion joint is there in nearest our piping location (Displacement = 50mm).

How I applied this building expansion displacement in Caesar II software. Could you please suggest for this Building expansion
displacement applying method for Caesar II software.

What is the cause of the displacement?

Dear Michael,

Thank you for your response, Please note that the building expansion is due to temperature changes and loads on each building.

Here each building can move 50 mm near the building expansion joint. Also our pipes are crossing at these the bundling expansion joint (Please Refer the Attachment).

We request you to advice us how to considered these kind of building expansion in CAESAR II software.

Also our client requesting to provide expansion bellow in the chilled water piping system near the building expansion joint.

Regards
Venket.A

Dear Mr.Michael_Fletcher,

Please advise us the above issue and how to accommodate the building expansion at inside the building piping system.

Regards
Rajivgandhi

Rajivgandhi,

I suggest you compute what applied concentrated force is necessary to displace one end of the expansion joint 50 mm (Kx=f). Then you can setup load cases with or without the applied force vector.

Applying a displacement will fix the node at the displaced position, which means there will be no further deflection, regardless of other applied loads.

If the buildings themselves possess an expansion joint and are compressing and moving independently of the pipe that's housed within, I would recommend splitting the analysis into 3 parts - what happens before the expansion joint, what happens after the expansion joint, and what happens at the expansion joint.

It is your responsibility to ascertain and estimate (or design!) the distance from the expansion joint at which point the pipe is unaffected by the expansion joint.

Thus, all 3 of your models will have displacements where they connect to the other models, but you don't have to risk user error or CAESAR non-convergence problems through mass input of displacements everywhere.