A study on failure characteristic of spherical pressure vessel

This paper reports an experimental investigation of the failure behavior of pressure vessels during high pressure of hydraulic loading. The pressure vessels were manufactured by two different procedures. One method is spin forming and tungsten inert gas (TIG) welding process and the other is blow forming and solid-state diffusion bonding process. The failure behavior has been studied and the effect of forming method has been analyzed. The result shows that the pressurization rate and the acoustic emission signal increasing rate provide a similar tendency for a vessel of integrity, while the signal increasing rate is much higher than the pressurization rate for a vessel with defects. It is clear that the acoustic emission response of the vessel to the pressure loading can be successfully applied to predict the structural integrity and failure behavior of the vessels manufactured with both methods.