1 – The safety factor on the tensile strength: historical background In the 19th century, when the first steam boilers started to be designed and fabricated, the most important problem that the designers had to solve was the determination of the allowable stress of the carbon steel plates used in their…
Many years ago, when the calculation report of a pressure vessels (doesn’t matter according to which pressure vessel standard) was composed by a couple of pages, nobody was really worried about nozzle loads: or better, we all knew that piping connected to the vessel could transmit to the vessel wall…
What is Fatigue? If you ask this question, all engineers working in Pressure Equipment design will certainly give the correct answer: Fatigue is that phenomenon, for which in metallic structures subject to cyclic loading, in some particular location, after a certain number of load cycles, a fatigue crack will be…
The use of Finite Element Calculations in Pressure Equipment Design has now become a standard procedure either in USA or in Europe, in all cases where the traditional “Design by Formulae” is not able to provide a specific solution. Such calculations are in fact much cheaper now than they were…
What is the procedure to prepare harmonized standards for pressure equipment? As all the “New Approach” directives, the Pressure Equipment Directive (PED) cannot be applied without standards that are capable to translate into detailed instructions the Essential Safety Requirements contained in the Directive. In fact, the Directive itself doesn’t contain…