The structural design of pressure vessels is a rather complicated engineering task and demands on using finite element method (FEM) software to recreate many issues accompanying the design process. One of them is a choice of the shape of reinforcing pads, connecting a min shell of a vessel with nozzles. The mentioned issue is very rarely taken up by researchers. Some of them considered different reinforcement pads (circular and elliptical) using the finite element method (FEM), but they presented results of a nozzle-shell connection without describing results for the rest of the vessel. The other authors performed a thorough FEM analysis of a vessel, but they considered only circular reinforcing pads. The authors of this paper analyzed a pressure vessel without and with reinforcing plates with an elliptical shape. They performed FEM calculations of the vessels using a non-linear material model and a coupled thermal-stress analysis in Abaqus software. The use of the elliptic plate resulted in a considerable decrease in the thickness of the shell and turned out to be an interesting alternative to circular pads. In the presented example, the percentage decrease in thickness was equal to 36%, and the total mass savings was 30%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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