A comparison study of filament wound composite cylindrical shell used in under water vehicle application by Finite Element Method

The most important property required in any structural material is high strength to weight ratio and corrosion resistance, hence composite materials gained grater interest in this field. The body of Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) is made up of composite cylindrical vessel which is subjected to different kind of loads when they are travelling in their respective environment. Buckling and post-buckling are the most dominant failure mechanism when the external hydrostatic pressure reached at elevated level in case of composite UUV. The present research was aimed to comparing the performance of stiffened and un-stiffened filament wound composite pressure vessel used for under water vehicle application. The cylinder is made by carbon/epoxy composite material; the winding pattern is [±60/90] FW for both the cases. The analysis has done by using finite element software ANSYS 14.0 APDL. 10 MPa external hydrostatic is applied which is equal to the pressure at a depth of 1000 m in water. The analysis results showed that the stiffened composite shell give the higher value of critical buckling pressure.