Abstract
Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastic (CFRP) pressure vessels are widely used for high pressure hydrogen container such as fuel tank of fuel cell vehi-cle (FCV) and accumulators at the hydrogen fueling stations. To commer-cialize FCV and hydrogen station, the cost of the CFRP pressure vessels have to be reduced with safety. The sufficient safety of the CFRP pres-sure vessels have been mostly examined by the performance and production tests so far since the Finite Element (FE) modeling of CFRP layers has not been sophisticated enough so as to yield reliable failure analysis result. In-stead of conventional continuum-based modeling method, we have proposed meso-scale modeling, where carbon fiber bundle and resin are exactly sepa-rated. Strength models of carbon fiber and resin are directly introduced for adequate strength prediction of CFRP layer. We exemplify the merit of the proposed methodology in a problem of manufacturing error caused by winding path variation in this study. We also reveal the limitation of conven-tional methodology based of macro-scale axisymmetric modeling of CFRP pressure vessel.
