TY  - EJOU
AU  - Brusa, Eugenio  
AU  - Nobile, Matteo  

TI  - Development of a Numerical Toolbox for the Computer Aided Design of Composite Over-Wrapped Pressure Vessels
T2  - Computer Modeling in Engineering \& Sciences

PY  - 2009
VL  - 48
IS  - 2
SN  - 1526-1506

AB  - Lightness of high pressure vessels is currently assured by composite materials. Construction of over-wrapped composite pressure vessels with inner metallic liner is for instance compatible with standards requirements of the hydrogen technology of energy storage. Therefore a typical layout manufactured by some industries consists of a cylindrical vessel with covering of carbon-epoxy laminates and metallic impermeable liner. To allow the filament winding of the composite fibres are used hoop and helical layers, respectively. A single nozzle is usually built. It requires that the vessel material is reinforced. This need imposes to have a variable thickness in the composite layer. In practice, fibres orientation angle and thickness are both variable. These aspects make hard a straight design operation by means of analytical approaches. In this paper a numerical design toolbox is developed. It includes a preliminary definition of the fibres network, found by the so-called netting analysis, the theory of composite laminates and the structural optimisation through the Finite Element Method. An industrial prototype was used as a test case to validate the proposed approach. Burst and auto-frettage pressures for the liner were predicted and a preliminary analysis of the fatigue life was performed.
KW  - High pressure vessel
KW  -  Carbon fiber laminates
KW  -  Finite Element Method
KW  -  Filament winding

DO  - 10.3970/cmes.2009.048.155