Originally Posted by
Tourist in MSN
If you are designing a long skinny cylindrical tank, if you double the diameter of that tank you will need to double the wall thickness of the tank walls to hold the same pressure. Why? The pressure is force per square inch (or some other measurement of force per measurement of area) and if you doubled the diameter of the long skinny tank you doubled the area between the walls. THus, if you use the same pressure, you have doubled the amount of force pushing that tank apart.
Seems like you are saying that given two volumes of different sizes but with equal pressures, the larger one must be stronger because it has more surface area and consequently more overall force acting upon it. I could be wrong, but that doesn't make sense to me because the additional forces are directly and proportionally offset by the increased amount of surface material.