Composite pressure vessels for commercial applications

Abstract

A new generation of composite pressure vessels for large scale market applications has been studied in this work. The vessels consist on a plastic liner wrapped with a filament winding glass fibre reinforced polymer matrix structure. A polyethylene (PE) was selected as liner for water at room temperatures applications and a thermosetting resin was used as matrices in the glass reinforced filament wound laminate. For applications having higher service temperatures, such as, termal accumulators and solar panel vessels, thermoplastics presenting greater temperature performance, for example, polypropylene (PP), polyamide (PA), polycarbonate (PC) Polyvinylidene difluoride (PVDF) or even thermosettings are being studied for application as vessel liners.