Good Day!

I have a question for support requirement as below.

"High energy piping shall be designed to be bottom supported off of the main pipeway steel members"

That's owner's requirements. But I don't understand exactly what "bottom supported off" means.

Normally high energy piping having big movment is installed to hanging type. I wonder whether it's same words.

Please advise.

I would interpret 'high energy' to mean likely to have dynamic loads such as flow or mechanicallly induced vibration or maybe transient loads such as surge, rather than a high temperature system.

It would make good sense to require such lines to be supported from below on robust steelwork, to minimise unwanted free movement such as would be allowed by hangers or relatively flexible inverted goal posts for example.

What if it's Power plant? Would 'high energy piping' not mean steam piping?

As far as I know, at the pipe rack area steam piping support tends to be hanging type due to inconvenience of giving slope to the 'bottom support'.

In the steam piping, dynamic loads may occur such as steam hammering or PSV popping up. Wouldn't this loads be minimized proper guide, stopper arrangemet?

I'd like to know the result, in my company's previous project rigid hangers are bouckled while operating. Taking lesson from that, we tried to use bottom supports at the main rack area.

I agree that power plant steam piping is indeed "high energy", but due to pressure and fluid effects, not the temperature.

Pipe that simply operates at a high temperature, just gets longer and less strong, otherwise it's quite docile (unless expansion is prevented).

IMHO any "high energy" piping system can be engineered with hanger rods, springs and rigid struts or hydraulic snubbers for instance, if properly designed and anaysed. The danger with "high energy" pipe is that it may not be recognised as such.

The intent here is to eliminate the risk of a threaded rod or hanger component failure; more potential failure points than a support beam below. If a pipe shoe fails or is damaged/degraded, at least there is something (beam) still below the pipe to prevent unlimited sag. Offshore clients in particular require "catch beams" below any hanger due to potential hanger failure due to fire, corrosion, etc.