STRUCTURAL AND THERMAL ANALYSIS OF A BOILER USING FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS

ABSTRACT Steam boiler is a closed vessel in which water or other fluid is heated under pressure and the steam released out by the boiler is used for various heating applications. The main considerations in the design of a boiler for a particular application are Thermal design and analysis, Design for manufacture, physical size and cost. In the present work a fire tube boiler is analyzed for static and Thermal loading. The geometric model of boiler is created in CATIA V5 software as per the drawing. This model is imported to HYPERMESH through IGES format and FEA model with converged mesh is developed using shell elements. To this FEA model various loading conditions like design pressure, thermal loads and operating conditions are applied. One of the supporting legs is arrested in all the directions and the other one is arrested only in X, Z-directions and all rotations. All these are created by using HYPERMESH and it is exported to ANSYS for solution to obtain the deflections, stresses. Those values are correlated with material allowable values as per the ASME Section VIII Division 2. Keywords: Finite element analysis, boiler, thermal analysis, structural analysis