You want it 'strong', machine it from solid billet.
Expect complaints about weight and cost and manufacturing difficulty.
Have there been any actual failures, or failures to meet expectations, or are you just worrying?
The problem with just adding baffles, ribs, whatever, based on speculation, fear, or eyeball engineering, is that there are a lot of ways to make the overall product weaker by adding material.
Are those sanitary flanges? The shanks appear fairly thick. I might expect fatigue cracks in the walls near the flange attachment welds. ... if the unit is subject to vibration, facts not in evidence. If that is the case, the unit might become more satisfactory by reducing the thickness of the flanges near the tank welds. It's also possible to make the joints stronger by making the sheet thicker, near the tank-flange welds, but that's easier said then done.
Do the flanges always connect by hose to everything else? If any rigid-ish pipework attaches, you might want to apply moments in your analysis, representing misalignment and deflection of other stuff.
You don't necessarily need Finite Element Analysis to figure out what do next, but you do need some kind of Analysis, starting with estimates of the real loads applied in all possible circumstances, and decisions about how you expect the product to behave in each load case. Example, at 250psi internal pressure (please use water or grease, no gas, in any testing you might try), I'd expect the tank walls to balloon out and change the geometry to look a bit more like a basketball or a cow's udder. Is that a bad thing? Would such extreme deflection cause the product to stop working properly? You need to ask and answer a fair number of questions like that make progress.
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
