Engineering failure assessment methods applied to pressurised components Original Research Article

Two different engineering flaw assessment procedures are applied to component tests of pre-cracked pressure vessels. The first one is a failure assessment diagram (FAD) approach according to the PD6493 procedure of BSI. The second one is a crack driving force (CDF) approach provided by the engineering treatment model (ETM). The theoretical background of both the methods is discussed. As compared with the experiments both procedures yield conservative predictions of the experimental failure loads. The conservatism is shown to be acceptably small from a user’s point of view.