General Description

Piping is indispensable to petroleum refineries, chemical plants, and other process units. Piping for most process units represents the major item of unit investment. Typical total erected piping cost ranges from 25 to 50 percent of the total cost of a unit. Consequently, the piping engineer often faces the necessity of making careful and realistic compromises between design features and cost without sacrificing minimum safety standards.

This chapter provides a basic guide to the design of process piping, with specific emphasis on petroleum refineries, chemical, and other related processing plants. It attempts to provide an overview of the fundamental design principles used by the ASME Pressure Piping Code, Section B31.3, Process Piping. This Code prescribes requirements for materials and components, design, fabrication, assembly, erection, examination, inspection, and testing of piping. References will be made to other chapters within this handbook where more detailed coverage of design analyses and acceptance criteria are provided that relate to the ASME B31.3 Code. ¹ This chapter will also provide guidelines for the design and layout of specific systems typically found in petroleum refineries and related petrochemical processing plants.

Prior to the 1976 edition of ANSI B31.3, this Code was titled Petroleum Refinery Piping, with direct application to the petroleum refinery industry; by inference it also served as the guiding document for the chemical process industry. The Code then expanded its scope to include areas...