Q: I am presently carrying out an analysis on an air cooler piping system for the first time.

In this system the inlet header is resting on the cooler inlet nozzle. When I modelled the
piping system with only the nozzle displacements on their mating flanges, I observed that
the Forces, Fx, Fy and Fz are pretty high even in the sustained (SUS) case. I was wondering
if I could model this as a "Y" restraint with the displacements at their respective connecting
nodes instead, since the cooler nozzles would act as a rest for the inlet header in the
sustained case. Please I would like to know your views and any advice on this issue.

A: I usually model the air cooler header box as a set of rigid elements going to a common
anchor point. Your piping header and air cooler header box should be at essentially the
same temperature, so you should not get loads due to differential nozzle movement.

In cases like this, I much prefer to construct a model of the equipment instead of inputting
calculated displacements. When you have two or more connections like that to the same
equipment, even though you've calculated the movements "correctly" I find that the nozzle
movements won't match the piping movements enough to avoid Caesar reporting significant
loads. The loads do not exist.