COMPOSITE PRESSURE VESSELS

Abstract

Cylindrical pressure vessels are widely used for commercial, under water vehicles and in aerospace applications. At present the outer shells of the pressure vessels are made up of conventional metals like steels and aluminum alloys. The payload performance/ speed/ operating range depends upon the weight. The lower the weight the better the performance, one way of reducing the weight is by reducing the weight of the shell structure. The use of composite materials improves the performance of the vessel and offers a significant amount of material savings. Moreover, the stacking sequence is very crucial to the strength of the composite material. This Project involves various objective functions such as stiffness, buckling load and Weight at each level of optimization. Usually composite pressure vessels are designed for minimum mass under strength constraints. A graphical analysis is presented to find optimum fiber orientation for given layer thicknesses. In the present work, an analytical model is developed for the Prediction of the minimum buckling load with / without stiffener composite shell of continuous angle ply laminas (±45°,±55°,±65°,±75°,±85°) for investigation. Comparisons are made for two different approaches i.e. the finite element model and the theoretical model. A 3-D finite element analysis is built using ANSYS-12.0 version software into consideration, for static and buckling analysis on the pressure vessel