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passive_fist comments on Even better cryonics – because who needs nanites anyway? - Less Wrong
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Is that done to convert shear force to tension?
I wonder, how much can be achieved by merely increasing the thickness of the walls (even to such extremes as a small hole in a cubic meter of steel)?
To my understanding it's because of the higher tensile strength of carbon fiber, although I could be wrong.
In a round vessel containing pressure, a pressure gradient is set up from the inside wall to the outside. You can think of such a vessel as a series of concentric shells of increasing radius, each of which only has to support the pressure differential acting upon it. At some pressure level, this pressure differential itself becomes so high that it tears the material apart, regardless of how thick the walls are or how tiny the interior radius is. The physics of this isn't terribly complicated but I don't have any links at the moment, sorry.
Sure, I can easily imagine that by mentally substituting steel with jello - at some point you're tear it apart no matter how thick the walls are. However, that substitute also gives me the impression that most shapes we would normally consider for a vessel don't reach the maximum strength possible for the material.
Most vessels are spherical or cylindrical, which is already pretty good (intuitively, spherical vessels should be optimal for isotropic materials). You might want to take a look at the mechanics of thin-walled pressure vessels if you didn't already.
It's important to note that the radial stresses in cylindrical vessels are way smaller than the axial and hoop stresses (which, so to say, pull perpendicular to the "direction" of the pressure). This is also why wound fibers can increase the strength of such vessels.