Light-Weight Design of the Tubesheet of a High Pressure U-Tube Heat Exchanger Based on Finite Element Analysis

Based on Chinese code GB151 for the design of shell-and-tube heat exchangers, the tubesheets are usually very heavy. The reason is attributed to the oversimplified mechanical model for the calculation of the tubesheet thickness especially the insufficient consideration of the tube support to the tubesheet. In this paper, a 3-D finite element model was established for a U-tube heat exchanger consisting of tubesheet, tube-channel, part of shell and tubes. A static stress analysis was performed under tube-side pressure loading. Optimal computation or light-weight design was carried out for minimum thickness of the tubesheet with the precondition of strength requirements conforming to the design-by-analysis code JB4732-1995. It is found that with the optimization design, the thickness of the tubesheet could be decreased by 31%, meaning that by using finite element method together with the code of design-by-analysis the thickness of the tubesheet can be significantly reduced.