ABSTRACT
The design of pressure vessels for operating at very high pressure is a complex problem. The pressure vessels used in wide applications such as in thermal and nuclear power plants, in chemical industries, in space and ocean depths, in hydraulic units of aircrafts and fluid supply systems in industries. The pressure vessels have different shape of opening like manholes, hand holes, and nozzles and have different size of opening such as small drain to full vessel size opening with body flange. The opening cannot be avoided in the pressure vessels because of various piping attachment. Due to openings in the vessels shell around the opening are weakened. This cause stress concentration because of geometrical discontinuity in the vessels. Such discontinuities are called as stress raiser and region in which they occur is called the area of stress concentration. Stress concentration factor is used to quantify how the stress is concentrated in a component. So the present study makes an attempt to find the effect of diameter and position of openings on toroidal pressure vessels. The pressure vessels shall be analyzed by using PreWin, a graphical pre and post processor for the structural analysis software FEAST (Finite Element Analysis of Structures). The toroidal shell is idealized with various elements like 4 / 8 noded solid of revolution and shell/ solid elements using FEAST and results compared with those obtained using analytical values. This paper is an attempt to study of the effect of openings of 10 mm to 150 mm on toroidal pressure vessels. Also find out the variation of stress concentration factor for different diameter of hole. To find the effect of position of hole, the holes of different diameters are placed at two different locations of the shell.
