Advance optimum design of multi-layer compound cylinders

The purpose of this work is to find the optimum design for two-layer compound cylinders of the same material with an open end condition by using the elimination method. The optimization method depends on reducing the number of design variables with a simultaneous yield hypothesis for all layers of the compound cylinder. A combination of von Mises and Tresca criteria is used as a yield criterion, and the superposition principle is used to evaluate the equivalent stresses for each cylinder. By considering the working pressure and the internal diameter of the inner cylinder as the design parameters (constants during optimization) and the total thickness of the compound cylinder as the objective function, the optimization algorithm has been programmed in C# with a user-friendly graphical interface. The optimization results (outer diameter, interference diameter, and shrinkage pressure) are obtained for different working pressures and compared with the optimum design, which is based only on the Tresca criterion. The total mass of the compound cylinder can be reduced by up to 50% by using the von Mises–Tresca combination criterion. The optimized results are validated numerically by using finite element analysis in the ANSYS Workbench. The theoretical result and the FEA result agree with each other with errors of about 2%. The behavior of the optimized parameters for different working pressures is also observed and presented.