The work reported has relevance to the assessment of the response of chemical plant structures to transient pressure loads, which may occur in a range of process operations during normal or failure conditions, and which require consideration at the design stage to contain their effects.. Experimental and numerical results are presented for the case of the rupture of a high pressure cube, which is contained within a liquid-filled shell and tube heat exchanger of overall length 3.75 m and diameter 0.75 m. Such a tube failure gives rise to a pressure pulse load on the shell, and the measured pressure transient from this event has been used in a finite element analysis to compare measured and observed strains at the shell surface. Structural failure criteria can be introduced into the analysis and the predictive capability of this has been initially used to predict yield in circular plates exposed to transient pressure loads of different amplitude and duration. Comparison between observed and calculated strains, and the onset of yield, enable a failure limit curve to be constructed as a function of pressure amplitude and duration, and this is compared with the predicted curve based on a prescribed failure criterion. Calculations on the heat exchanger have been extended to explore the region of Failure due to yield, and the predicted limit curve demonstrates that pressure amplitudes may be allowed to exceed the yield pressure if pulse widths are short. The engineering benefits arising from these observations are discussed in relation to the likely design implications.