A Methodological Approach for the Design of Composite Tanks Produced by Filament Winding

In this paper, an original approach for the virtual prototyping of composite pressure tanks is proposed. The main tests to be conducted for the homologation of the vehicle tank is the burst pressure, which is a quasi-static test. This method aims to reduce the finite element model development time by the integration between the computational software MATLAB and the FEA tool Abaqus. Since the dome shape has fundamental influence on the mechanical performances of the composite pressure vessel, the presented procedure allows the designer to quickly import the suitable dome geometry into Abaqus, without the need of going through CAD software. The first step of the method here reported is the definition of all the geometric and operational parameters necessary to the construction of the dome meridian profile. The second step is to enter those parameters in a MATLAB script, which is able to integrate the dome profile differential equation, to generate the whole tank profile and to import this profile into Abaqus. Once the geometry has been imported, a FE model of the high-pressure vessel can be built and virtual simulations can be performed. This approach could be implemented in a dome optimization process to find which dome meridian profile gives the best tank performances.