Sure.  Imagine a circular cylindrical tank.  When partially full roll of the ship would leave the tankage CG unchanged while the CG of the rest of the ship (assuming it's stabilized by a keel) would move opposite the roll.  So the overall CG would change. But you can't tell the stability of a floating object in general just by considering the CG location.  You have to consider the center of bouyancy too and their relative motion.  Think of a catamaran.  The CG doesn't change when it rolls, but the center of bouyancy moves to provide a righting moment. Brent On 7/29/2018 10:30 PM, Jason Holt wrote:

I just learned about free surface effect: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_surface_effect

And it makes me wonder: imagine a cross section blueprint of a ship perpendicular to the keel. We want to design the cross section of an oil compartment that will run stem to stern and minimizes free surface effect.

To keep it simple, let's just consider a static case where the ship has listed to port or starboard and the fluid in our tank has settled. The tank is, say, 50% full. Can tank shape affect the ship's change in center of gravity? _______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com https://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun