FLHTCUI
Mechanical
- Jan 6, 2011
- 7
I am attempting to come up with a method to design baffles in large pressure vessels using horizontal stiffening. These baffle may be as tall as 20' or more and the resources I have only indicate 1 or 2 stiffeners which would cause the baffle thickness to be excessive. The approach I have used in the past was to treat the baffle plate as a 1" strip loaded at 0 at the top and increasing to whatever load was caused by static head at the bottom. I would then use a software program, "Beam 2D", to determine the reaction and moments at locations I would choose using trial and error to get the reactions close to the same and using the number of stiffeners that would give an acceptable baffle thickness. I would then use the reactions as the uniform load and perform a simple beam evaluation fixed at both ends the length of which was the baffle width to determine the required MOI I needed for the stiffeners. My problem is when I upgraded my computer to Windows 7 - 64 bit the Beam 2D program will not work. I have tried to find formulae for moment and reaction determination with unequal spans but have been unsuccessful. I have also searched for inexpensive software that would give me the reactions and moments at the stiffeners but although I did find one and purchased it, but upon using it for my 1st design have found the results to be suspect. Without knowing the formulae to confirm I have no way of varifying. It also gave widely different results on a previous design I hade performed with the Beam 2D software.
Does anyone know where I can find the formulae to determine the Moments and Reactions on beams with unequal spacing and with uniformly increasing loads or an inexpensive software package which can perform the required evaluation?
Does anyone know where I can find the formulae to determine the Moments and Reactions on beams with unequal spacing and with uniformly increasing loads or an inexpensive software package which can perform the required evaluation?
