cheskalyn12
18.05.2021 14:07:30
Use this calculator to determine how much flotation material will be needed and what the capacity of the resulting dock will be. more
See full version: Dock Flotation Calculator
Use this calculator to determine how much flotation material will be needed and what the capacity of the resulting dock will be. more
Please call to discuss your exact requirements.
You may actually be looking for an expanded polystyrene (EPS) product. See the difference between STYROFOAM Brand Foam products and expanded polystyrene, which is often mistakenly referred to as Styrofoam.
I have some object (300g) that I want to keep above the water. I could run experiments to figure out how much foam I need but I'd have to do this for every object with a different mass. What equation should I use that will get me close to what I need without trial and error?
According to the Archimedes principle, you need to displace the amount of water equal to the weight of the object plus the weight of the foam. Neglecting the weight of the foam, you need $300\,cm^3$ or To account for the weight of the foam, you need to increase this amount slightly. The density of styrofoam is about 20 times less than water, so you need to increase the volume by about 5% to $315 cm^3$ as the minimum, give or take. A third of a liter would do. This is roughly a $6\text<->cm$ or 2.7" cube..3\,liters$ of foam to hold an object of $300\,g$.
The equation would be to use the same amount of cubic centimeters of foam, as the number of grams in the object weight and then increase the result by at least 5%. This would position your object at the surface. To avoid the object getting wet, just slightly increase the amount of foam. more
Re: Floatation calculations, or what will it take to float your boat ? [links]
What do you do with the 10.4 cubic feet?
In total I got four 2? boards, one 1.5 inch board, and four ? inch boards, for a total of (4*2.7)+(1*2.0)+(4*1.0) = 16.8 cu ft, which will float (16.8x62.4) = 1048 pounds
The other thing about the two part pourable foam is that it has to be poured in a warm (80s F) room to get full expansion. In 60s you'll be losing maybe a third of the volume you could get.
It's counter intuitive. Think of it like this - a 1x1x1 meter cube of steel weighs about 7850kg in air. more
Re: Floatation calculations, or what will it take to float your boat ? more
12x12= 144 square feet x 31 = 4464 lbs of buoyancy required. In this example, you can use 4 of the DF-486012 (48" x 60" x 12" floats with 1190 lbs of buoyancy each) which yield a total buoyancy of 4760 lbs.
Your final step is to determine how many square inches of the structure's cross-members you should place in contact with the floats to transfer the structure's weight to the floats. To determine the size of this float contact area in square inches, multiply the dead load of the structure by the appropriate Design Factor in Table 2 (based on the expected wave action). Since this is the contact area for the entire structure, and since you want to determine the contact area for each cross-member which will be bearing on the floats, divide your answer by twice the number of floats you'll be using (assuming a minimum of two cross-members per float). [links]
1. Determining Your Live and Dead Loads more