Dimensioning of thick-walled spherical and cylindrical pressure vessels

In this contribution, we revisit the rather classical problem of Lame and provide a novel and easy way to plot the stress distributions and the overall absolute maximum von Mises stress for arbitrary parameters in only two diagrams. We also provide a maximum hoop stress formula for combined loading and an extensive discussion covering the accuracy of dimensioning via the maximum hoop stress instead of the maximum von Mises stress, as well as the accuracy of the classical approximative hoop stress formulas.