Structural Design for steel structure with barge deflection and high wind force

Dear Bentley Users,

 

I've been helped a lot with this forum. So I need you guys' opinion in designing this steel structure, which is a lot difficult issue for me..

 

Here's going to be Huge PIperack for the gas plant, and the designed equipment with steel structure will be on it.

 

Like picture above, piperack and the Air cooler equipment wil be transported through special desined Barge ship. Therefore a delection must be occured.

So, My problem goes like these :  

1) Normally, Steel structure for Air cooled Heat Exchanger has several braces for braces in order to resist external load like Roll, Pitch and Wind load…etc.

2) however, when deflection is taken forcibly into account, such reinforcement is acting in a negative way.

 If we remove some braces to cope with above 2),  we do have a problem with above 1) again.

In other words, structures are supposed to be reinforced but such reinforcement causes problem with deflection.

So, I am wondering if there are any great view of design this not-so-easy steel structure. I've tried use enforced buts for the support, (usually we do the fixed support but this case is not, because of the deflection. and I've thought about what if I made every connection pinned connection with shop-bolted.) though there were not a huge different between fixed but & enforced but. I really need some advice on this project.. any ideas for this? If you need more information about this(like any other informations for this work, STAAD Pro. file), Please kindly let me know and I'll be superquick for those demand.

 

Best Regards,

 

Heying Lee

S&Tc

hilee@hisnt.com

 

  • Heying,

    I think the correct way to model this is to include the barge in the model with piperack. I know this is complicated but consider when you attach the piperack to the barge it all becomes one structural system so the stiffness of the piperack affects the deflection the barge will experience.  I assume someone just put gravity loads into their barge model and then fed you the deflections. I don't think it is correct to then feed these deflections back into your model.