A.

Stresses
For historical reasons, design stresses in the various
codes are different for similar materials. The logic of
the safety factors applied to the mechanical properties
is similar and is discussed in Sec. 4.1.1, but the values
of the safety factors are different.
Table 1 shows the current safety factors that are
used to obtain the basic design stress for carbon and lowalloy
steels in the principal codes. The use of different
design stresses will thus result in different component
thicknesses even if the design rules are similar. In some
cases, the rules are different and these themselves will
result in different component thicknesses. As seen in
Sec. 4.3.1A, the designer very rarely has a choice in the
design code to be used, but it is nevertheless instructive
to compare the different design rules. The major differences
are found in the components discussed below.
B. Cylinders: External pressure
The most widely used expression for predicting buckling
pressure in cylinders was derived by von Mises and later
Table 1
corrected by Windenburg and Trilling. Forms of this
expression are used by the major vessel codes, and any
differences in the calculated allowable external pressure
for simple cylinders will be due to the different safety
factors and the different permitted tolerances. The
deviation from a true circular shape can have a major
effect: As a rough guide, if the deviation is equal to the
cylinder thickness, then the critical buckling pressure
will be about half that for the true cylinder; and if the
deviation is one-tenth the thickness, the reduction will
be about a quarter. The permitted deviations vary with
the codes:
ASME: Depending on the ratios of length/diameter
and diameter/thickness, the deviation can be between
30 and 100% of the thickness.
BS: The shell must be circular to within 0.5% on the
radius, measured on the true circle.
Merkblatter: The rules permit a shell circular to
0.75% on the radius measured on the true circle. A
formula is given to enable the calculation of external
pressure if the deviation is different from 0.75%.