Abstract

The Titanic disaster is one of the most well-known disasters to the world. Many engineering problems that the Titanic had were not known to be issues at the time of construction, contributing to the disaster. This project explores the insufficient bulkhead system of the Titanic. It finds that the Titanic will sink with any five of its compartments flooded, and attempts to approximate how long it took the ship to sink. As this project consists of “back-of-the envelope calculations”, the figures obtained are not as accurate as historical information, but serve as a useful estimate and teach basic physics principles.

The main purpose of this project is to estimate some figures for the Titanic’s sinking, using basic physics principles and assumptions.