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On Floating Bodies (Greek: Περὶ τῶν ἐπιπλεόντων σωμάτων) is a work, originally in two books, by Archimedes, one of the most important mathematicians, physicists, and engineers of antiquity.
In On Floating Bodies, Archimedes suggested that (c. 246 BC): Any object, totally or partially immersed in a fluid or liquid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object. Archimedes' principle allows the buoyancy of any floating object partially or fully immersed in a fluid to be calculated.
Flotation of flexible objects is a phenomenon in which the bending of a flexible material allows an object to displace a greater amount of fluid than if it were completely rigid.
In his work On Floating Bodies, Archimedes demonstrated that the orientation of a floating object is the one that makes its center of mass as low as possible. He developed mathematical techniques for finding the centers of mass of objects of uniform density of various well-defined shapes.
Stable floating objects have a natural rolling frequency, just like a weight on a spring, where the frequency is increased as the spring gets stiffer. In a boat, the equivalent of the spring stiffness is the distance called "GM" or "metacentric height", being the distance between two points: "G" the centre of gravity of the boat and "M", which ...
The design of watercraft requires a tradeoff among internal capacity (), speed and seaworthiness.Tonnage is important for transport of goods, speed is important for warships and racing vessels, and the degree of seaworthiness varies according to the bodies of water on which a watercraft is used.
The study of fluid mechanics goes back at least to the days of ancient Greece, when Archimedes investigated fluid statics and buoyancy and formulated his famous law known now as the Archimedes' principle, which was published in his work On Floating Bodies—generally considered to be the first major work on fluid mechanics.
The lever and its properties were already well known before the time of Archimedes, and he was not the first to provide an analysis of the principle involved. [5] The earlier Mechanical Problems, once attributed to Aristotle but most likely written by one of his successors, contains a loose proof of the law of the lever without employing the concept of centre of gravity.