Defining a reduced volume zone for the simulation of burst test on a composite pressure vessels

Abstract : A Fibre-Break Model (FBM) developed at Mines ParisTech can predict the burst pressure of high pressure composite vessels. This model uses random values of fibre strength at each Gauss point of the considered vessels meshed with finite element (FE). However, previous studies has determined the optimum FEs to be used on real-scale structures (0.1 mm x 0.1 mm x 8 mm). A simple calculation shows that, on a real-scale pressure vessel, this induces a gigantic number of FEs, hence the extensive computation time. To overcome this problem, the integral range method is proposed to find a reduced volume zone of the vessels, on which an equivalent calculation can be made and gives the same results with the one that employs the FBM on the entire structure.