Behavior of flawed pressure vessels

A study was conducted to determine the extent that well-characterized flaws degrade the performance of spherical pressure vessels and to evaluate the ability of advanced nondestructive test techniques to detect these flaws. This interdisciplinary study provides a major step towards establishing quantitative relationships between nondestructive acceptance criteria and the actual performance of flawed pressure vessels. When applied during proof testing, holographic techniques were found to detect inner wall defects spanning 10% or more of the wall thickness. Burst performance data and growth data obtained by radiographing under load forms the basis of analytical studies directed at evaluating the performance of tough materials in the presence of flaws. Both elastic-plastic finite element and J-integral techniques have been applied