Pressure Vessel FEA

Conducted FEA analysis using ANSYS on a fictional pressure vessel that has ruptured.

The direction and magnitude of the applied load on the body

Role

Mechanical Engineer

Project Highlights

Perform finite element analysis (FEA) on a ruptured pressure vessel for a fictional company. FEA is critical to ensure that stresses experienced by different components within a structure are within the stress limits, and will not cause failure. Half of the pressure vessel was built in the software using a given engineering drawing, and configured using Aluminum.

Tools

ANSYS

Results/Lessons Learned

Increasing the element size requires less time in solving the model but is less accurate. Additionally, using quadratic elements increases the accuracy of the solution, but also increases the solution time.
Some sources of error in this study include using mesh sizes that are too coarse to give accurate results for a certain element size. Since smaller mesh sizes give more accurate results. Human error is also a possible source of error, for example, inputting incorrect property values or dimensions of the component. Furthermore, discretization errors may arise in the process of creating the mesh (for the curved portions of the pressure vessel), and numerical errors of the solution of the FEA equations may lead to skewed results. Lastly, the reaction forces on the body may be overestimated while the internal forces may be underestimated.
In investigating the circumstances surrounding the pressure vessel failure, one important figure was the ultimate tensile strength of the Aluminum utilized in the pressure vessel. This was set at 310 MPa. The more accurate FEA results (smaller mesh size) exceed this figure in equivalent stress, indicating that the force that the pressure vessel was subject to in the figure was sufficient to cause structural failure. In this case, the structural failure was a rupture that proved fatal to two factory workers.