We have a vertical vessel with alloy material of 100mm thick as the outside material and it is combined with a Stainless steel of 6mm thick as the inside material for corrosion protection.

My question is what material will you consider to calculate the thermal expansion of the vessel..Alloy or Stainless steel?
SS is thinner compared to alloy.

Thanks for your opinion...

It depends how accurate you want/need to be.

A quick, conservative approach would be to pick the material that will give you the worst thermal expansion for your calculation. Or you could run 2 calculations - one with each material.

Calculating the realistic thermal expansion of the vessel is likely to be complex and time consuming (or will require a lot of discussion with the vendor). In most circumstances it is not worth the effort as you know the situation wont be worse than the simple suggestions I've listed above.

Thanks MattR. That's a very good suggestion. Sometimes we really need to envelope things in the world of stress analysis to be comfortable with our design (some sort of parametric/sensitivity studies). Or it will take forever to finish the job in trying to find the accurate information. Good judgment call there.


Cheers!!!!!