At the end of this section you should be able to:

1. Know when a thin-wall approximation is valid

2. Calculate stress in thin-walled cylindrical and spherical pressure vessels

Pressure Vessels covers thin walled pressure vessel analysis for pressurized tanks. You will learn how to decide when the thin wall approximation is appropriate, then calculate the membrane normal stresses produced by internal pressure in thin walled cylindrical vessels (hoop stress and longitudinal stress) and thin walled spherical vessels (uniform tangential stress). The page emphasizes using pressure, vessel radius, and wall thickness to compute average stress and support design checks, with Mathematica resources available for solving and verification.