Gas Compressor Base Plate

High-speed gas compressors supplied to offshore petrochemical installations are subjected to very onerous design conditions. In an offshore platform application the baseplate support system has to be designed to cope with more than the usual load criteria, such as torque reaction and pipework forces. It has to satisfy conditions associated with the loads imposed by potential ship collision, inadvertent impact loads from dropped objects, and even the blast forces due to  an on-board explosion. Finite element analysis was used to study the effect of each of these imposed loading conditions. In the case of the more violent loading conditions, such as blast effects, it was necessary to adopt an elastic-plastic analysis to study the behaviour. The baseplate was capable of sustaining such an event without catastrophic failure of the various mountings.

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