Calculating Submerged Weight
© 2008 Douglas GouldToss a solid brick of steel into the water and it sinks, but pound that steel brick into theshape of a salad bowl, and it will float. That is because a steel salad bowl will displace anamount of water that is equal to the actual weight of the bowl itself. By changing the steelbrick to a steel bowl, we didn’t make it buoyant, all we did was take advantage of thebuoyant force of water to make the steel float. The buoyant force was always there,acting on brick and bowl alike. Archimedes of Syracuse became so famous for his enduring ideas that today he needsonly one name: Archimedes (like Cher, I guess). If he were alive today, he would bemuch to smart to become a marine salvor. But almost two-thousand five-hundred yearsago he did discover an interesting phenonemon when he descibed what happens when asolid gets immersed in a fluid. Expressed mathimatically, Archimedes’ Principal lookslike someone spilled a Scrabble board:
m
b
=
m
object
*
(
1 –
p
fluid
/
p
object
)
Expressed in plain English, it says:
‘a body immersed in a fluid is buoyed up by a forceequal to the weight of the displaced fluid’.
Notice that the buoyant force pushing theobject ‘up’ is not based on the weight of the object, but rather the weight of the fluid. Thebuoyant force is created because the object has pushed, or
displaced
, some of the fluid.This makes the fluid really angry, and it tries with all its might to push that object back up to the surface. And it is simple to measure the force; just weigh the fluid that getsdisplaced. Think about this for a minute….liquids create a force that pushes solid objectsback toward the surface. That could come in handy, huh?A cubic foot of sea water weighs 64 lbs. According to Archimedes’ Principal, for everycubic foot of sea water that a solid displaces, it will be
buoyed up
by 64 lbs of force. Acubic foot is a measurement of volume, not weight. A cubic foot of cast iron weighs morethan a cubic foot of aluminum, but they both displace the exact same volume of water,and each would receive the same 64 lbs of buoyancy if submerged. This is where the plotthickens.On the surface, a cubic foot of cast iron weighs 442 lbs. But underwater, it is beingpushed to the surface by 64 lbs of force. The practical effect of the buoyant force createsa
submerged weight
of 378 lbs. With one cubic foot, it is simple math: 442 lbs
down
, 64lbs
up
equals 378 lbs left over. That means that we can make 442 lbs of cast ironneutrally buoyant by adding only 378 lbs of lift.A cubic foot of aluminum, on the other hand, weighs 170lbs, and it displaces the exactsame amount of water, so the
submerged weight
of the aluminum is 170 – 64 = 106lbs.(think 170 lbs.
down
, 64 lbs.
up
).
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