Conclusions

It was reasonably efficient to calculate whether the Titanic would sink, depending on the height of the bulkheads and the number of compartments flooded. However, calculating the time that the Titanic actually took to sink was much more difficult.

As the Titanic sank lower in the water as a result of the ship filling up with water, the distance between the holes and the waterline would have changed dramatically. Accommodating such a change in one’s calculations requires using the calculus to evaluate the changing rate of the water flowing in. Even finding the position of the hole is difficult, as the Titanic should pivot on its changing center of mass as the water fills up the ship asymmetrically. Such calculations are beyond the scope of this project. Using the simple assumptions we made did not yield astonishingly accurate results.

In summary, it is fairly easy to find whether an object has negative buoyancy (the object sinks) or positive buoyancy (the object floats). However, estimating the time it takes for the object to reach neutral buoyancy is much more difficult, and estimating the time it will take an object to reach the sea bottom is still more difficult, due to the complex ways that asymmetrical filling and turbulence of the water affect the ship.

Further Exploration

In the future, I would like to experiment with calculus and trigonometry to find more reasonable approximations for the ship’s behaviour when filled asymmetrically. One can also estimate the time it took for the ship to sink to the sea floor.

It has been hypothesized that the ship would not have sunk if she had rammed the iceberg straight on. One can, for example, find the compressive stress exerted on the steel, and use this information to find how much the ship crumpled. We can also hypothesize what would happen if some elements of the ship’s design had been changed – for example, if the ship would have sunk had her bulkheads been extended higher up.

In conclusion, the Titanic disaster offers a wealth of physics calculations to explore – this project can only explore a few of these calculations.