The post-yield behaviour of an internally pressurised cylinder having a pad attachment

A study of pressurised cylinders having attached pads was made. The possibility of a fatigue crack developing along one side of the pad was noted. For both defect-free components and components having axial crack-like defects, finite element and limited experimental studies of the local and global deformations were made and results were found to be in close agreement. Both welded and integrally machined pads were studied. It was observed that for defect-free components, the method of pad attachment has little effect on the burst pressure. The presence of a pad was found to increase the burst pressure of cracked components by a small but significant margin. A finite element-based parametric study of pipes with part-penetrating defects and a range of pad geometries has demonstrated that pad size has little influence on the limit load for any of the cracked cases considered. However, pipes with penetrating defects were strengthened by the presence of pads, particularly for thin-walled sections