This book is the first monograph focusing on ellipsoidal heads, which are commonly used as an end closure of pressure vessels in chemical, petroleum, nuclear, marine, aerospace and food processing industries. It provides a comprehensive coverage of stress, failure, design and fabrication of ellipsoidal heads. This book investigates in detail buckling/plastic collapse behaviors of ellipsoidal heads using nonlinear finite element methods and experiments. Buckling/plastic collapse experiments are performed on 37 ellipsoidal heads which cover various geometric parameters, material and fabrication...