Abstract: Large tubular reactor is key equipment in petrochemical plants. The structure of such reactor is similar to the fixed tube sheet heat exchanger in which the cylindrical shell on channel and shell side are welded with the top and bottom fixed tube sheet. With the scale of plants increased, the number of heat exchange tubes in such reactor is increased, resulting in large number of tubes. The 3D model is established for finite element stress analysis, which is inconvenient to use. In the analysis and calculation section of Annex in the ASME VIII.2 standard, the perforated plate design method based on the elastic stress analysis in Appendix 5-E is adopted to change the tube plate into an equivalent solid plate for stress analysis, which simplifies the calculation and is currently a more general approach in the world. This paper details the method of stress analysis of a large tubular reactor using the equivalent solid plate in ASME VIII.2, and compares it with the actual 3D model calculation. The results show that this method is reliable and can be applied in practical engineering.

Key words: perforated plate, elastic analysis, tubular reactor, equivalent solid plate, anisotropic elastic matrix, equivalent weight cylinder