Assessment of a Design Method for Composite Over-Wrapped Pressure Vessels for Hydrogen Storage

Present work deals with over-wrapped composite pressure vessels, for hydrogen storage, with inner metallic liner, reinforced by outer carbon-epoxy laminate. It is built by filament winding and includes hoop and helical layers. A design procedure is assessed, by including: a preliminary netting analysis, a definition of composite layers, according to the theory of composite laminates, and further refined by FEM. Numerical model investigates material strength at burst pressure, computes auto-frettage pressure for liner and predicts fatigue life, in low cycle range. An industrial prototype was used as test case for the implementation and the preliminary validation of the proposed approach, by performing an optimization of the final layout of the whole over-wrapped composite vessel.