Design of Submarine Pressure Hulls under External Hydrostatic Pressure

摘要

The paper presents an investigation into various methods of calculating the theoretical collapse loads for a pressure vessel, under uniform external hydrostatic pressure; based on different design codes. The design codes used for the investigation were BS 5500, for vessels under external pressure and also, the design charts of Ross of the University of Portsmouth. It is the opinion of the present authors that the current design methodology, namely BS 5500 was difficult to use and gave inaccurate collapse pressures for some large-scale pressure vessels. Moreover, BS 5500 appeared to be too pessimistic for one mode of failure and too optimistic for another mode of failure. For the present study, two full-scale 'theoretical' pressure vessels were used and the fore mentioned methodologies applied in its design to see if there were any similarities that each method may have had. From the results obtained, it became apparent that some methodologies were more accurate than others, depending on the mode of collapse. Moreover, it also became apparent that some of the methods themselves were outdated, user-unfriendly and in some cases, may have even been dangerous.