About | Developments | B3 | Thin Wall Pressure Vessel Stress Analysis

University of Dortmund Project
In a project with the Department of Pressure Vessel Design, exciting new applications for the boundary element method were investigated. Previously, the boundary element method had not been thought suitable for thin walled pressure vessels. In this project it was found that B3 maintains numerical stability for high ratios of subregion size to wall thickness (e.g. 350:1) and high ratios of element length to wall thickness (e.g. 100:1).

Impact: The impact of this research becomes apparent when contrasted to previously thought limits of 10:1 for subregion aspect ratios and 5:1 for element aspect ratios.
Under head of department Prof Dr E Weiss the project results were published by Dr J Rudolph and Michael Forster. Former PhD student Dr M Rauth had been researching into finite element analysis of extremely thin walled models and had developed geometry macros in ANSYS. One of Dr Rauth's models is shown in the top right picture, after transfer into CADfix from ANSYS using the IGES format. Dr Rauth's model had been partitioned for ANSYS-analysis, so CADfix tools were used to delete partitions and prepare the geometry for B3 analysis.