Excel sheet for basic design of pressure vessels

I am in the engineering field and working in a company that is into the fabrication of Pressure Vessels. It's a small company and we do not have dedicated designers employed. I carry out the estimation and costing of Pressure Vessels required by clients.

Generally, the client provides us with only a General Assembly drawing and we have to determine the thickness and size of the vessel according to the criteria of pressure and volume given by them. This was one of the major hurdles I faced while estimating for the item. I had to go through the exercise of determining the thickness by carrying out many different calculations. Moreover, I had to keep in mind the optimum size (height to width/diameter ratio) of the vessel too. If for a certain volume, I changed only the diameter, the thickness would change. Conversely, if I changed the height, the thickness would change again. To overcome this problem and to make my life easier, I started tinkering around with formulas in Excel. In the beginning, I had just fed in the calculation formulas individually and without any co-relation. But as is the case with any development, I was not satisfied and kept on upgrading my Excel sheet. Slowly, over the days and weeks, I created the sheet that I wanted and that is what you can see attached here.

I shall give a brief description of how it works: The very beginning of the sheet has a few black cells which are the only cells where one can insert the basic data such as diameter & length of shell, pressure, type of ends (ellipsoidal, torispherical, conical etc.), stress value etc. If you have the diameter & length as well as the design pressure, then, after you insert the data in the relevant cells you can see the thickness of the plates you require to build your vessel. If you do not have the diameter and length and only the volume is given then, by keeping your eye on the "volume of vessel" cell you can tinker around with the diameter and length cells till you get the right size. There is also an option of knowing the maximum allowable pressure a vessel can withstand given a certain thickness. After you get all the data in order, you can also view the empty weight of the vessel (shell + ends only)

The central portion of the sheet displays the details of the ends such as size, volume, area, weight and, most importantly, the blank size (required for the forming of dished ends). There is also a small conversion table on the extreme right where you can convert the pressure in different units like psi to kg/cm²g to MPa.

I have tried to make this excel sheet as user-friendly as possible complete with cell comments explaining how data is to be inserted in their respective cells.

When it comes to full-fledged designing of a pressure vessel, I am a novice but this sheet helped me a lot in getting the basics right. I am not sure how many people will find this useful but I can say that I did find it very handy for my calculations. I shall be very happy if it helps other people too.

Note: The formulas used for design calculations have been taken from the handbooks - Pressure Vessel Design Manual by Dennis Moss & Pressure Vessel Handbook by Eugene F. Megyesy

Excel sheet for basic design of pressure vessels

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