Why do ships have cicular windows,why not square ones?
In: Physics
When we are talking about strength, the most obvious analogy is water. Imagine a stream of water in a river. If you put something square-shaped in there, you would see vortices around, especially a lot of them near each corner. If you put something circular-shaped in the same stream, you also would see vortices but they would be smaller.
If we talk about the force-carrying structure, we could imagine internal forces as a stream in the river (structural part). And holes in part would create similar “vortices”, so-called stress (for simplicity, let’s say stress is internal force) concentrations. Those concentrations are locally increasing stresses. So, by that analogy, a circular hole would create smaller “vortices” than a square, therefore a circular hole would increase internal forces less than a square hole.
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