@TGS4, thanks for the clarification. I believe I was thinking too much about it. Perhaps I'm wrong here, but it could be more thought of as "the shell's ability to withstand local stresses", in which case, it makes sense the dimensions should be of the shell in consideration, and not the...
ASME BPVC (Section III Appendix XIII-3100, or in older Code versions, this is described in the Definitions section) says "A stressed region may be considered local if the distance over which the membrane stress intensity exceeds 1.1S does not extend in the meridional direction more than...
According to the stress classification table in ASME Sec. III Appendix XIII, the membrane stress due to internal pressure at any location in a cylindrical shell is classified as Pm. It also states that gross discontinuities are not considered for this categorization.
Intuitively, one would...
