A warning – this post is going to hurt your eyes. A LOT. With that out of the way, let’s proceed to discussing one of my favorite books your professors don’t know about – Bausbacher and Hunt’s Process Plant Layout and Piping Design.

At my company we found it a useful resource for training new engineers and piping designers. Other than my thermodynamics or fluids textbooks, I really don’t pull my (old and expensive) academic references off the bookshelf often, so I thought I’d talk a bit about this in the context of the hidden (from students) underworld of useful industrial grade resources that exist out there for orientation. Please put aesthetics aside and let’s look into B&H’s book.

What makes this book a great orientation to piping and plant design, for those so inclined?

First: Broad Applicability

The book smells like Houston, Oil, Chemicals, and Steam. The various chapters provide an orientation to layout and design principles for a wide range of process or power plants, equipment and piping types. Regardless whether you might work at or on a fossil coal or gas turbine plant, refinery, biogas facility, wastewater treatment center, hydro dam, solar thermal site – you are going to find something useful in this.

The initial chapters deal with general plant layout – who is doing this work, what are their skills, what considerations do they weigh when laying out any kind of facility. Even if you as a new engineer are not tasked with these considerations (responsibility usually falls under quite more experienced pipers and project engineers), you’d find it useful to speak the language and get a head start on understanding layout and equipment constraints as you work in an engineering team. You may work at an existing facility, in which case understanding some whys and hows help get you up to speed, and you often are tasked with retrofits that should obey similar principles.

The book deals with many types of equipment and special considerations when placing it or piping it up. Compressors, heat exchangers, boilers, pumps, piping and supports, structural steel, buried piping, instrumentation, tanks – these span a wide range of disciplines such as civil, structural, mechanical, electrical, and instrumentation and controls aspects. Reading this gives you a nice rainbow of multidisciplinary background that serves one well if on a track to be on job sites where all this work is occurring, performing cost estimating that has to tally up scope across a wide range, or being a project engineer responsible for coordinating many types of work and workers.

Second: Old School Yet Timeless Applicability

B&H deserve credit for some meticulous drafting. Each illustration in the book (apparently this was written in the age before photographs; certainly before computer-aided design) is carefully drawn and lettered. It’s rare to find such craftsmanship preserved like this in an instructional book. Engineers appreciate the time and effort that it must have taken to design facilities in the old days.

Germanic attention to detail

It certainly humbles one when you think of the skills old school designers and engineers must have had, honed over the years, compared to what we take for granted “out of the box” with an AutoCAD or Visio package. But the principles in the book aren’t out of date simply because the figures weren’t generated with the latest software. How to place valves around pumps, what kind of space to leave around exchangers, different types of instruments – lots of tips and tricks embedded in here.

Third: Nomographs

Few use nomographs anymore, but I’ve always been enthralled by them as a way to convey a complex relationship graphically.

Told you this would hurt

Although usually impossible to read, and all in the unwieldy US Customary Units, the book is replete with all sorts of tables and nomographs that at least allow you to get an intuitive feel for the behavior of certain systems. For example in the figure above, a sense for how pipe size and thermal growth affect how big to make a “loop” in the piping to accommodate thermal stresses. With calculators and software these days we’ve lost of bit of this Fingerspitzengefühl, and not enough folks have a sense anymore within an order of magnitude -which sometimes is close enough – what answers should be without digital assistance.

Summary

If you are a young engineer or designer that may find themselves around these sorts of industries/facilities, I’d recommend checking this out. If one wants to take it to the next level, then the Society of Piping Engineers and Designers (SPED) offers online training based around the book. You would probably want to:

1) Get your company to fund this – probably not enough loose change in your pockets and

2) Drink some caffeinated beverages for the overhead slide portions

However, the actual plant examples of design fails are fun, and overall it was a good class, though I was fairly experienced at the time of the course. Someone younger might benefit even more.

Hope that’s of use in your endeavors.