Feh the Floating Owl

thingiverse

As an assignment for George Mason University's Math 401: Mathematics Through 3D Printing, this is a print designed to float in water similarly to icebergs. For background, this project *dives* into Archimedes' Principle. Each student was tasked to create an object to float in water with varied infill percentages to collect a large number of objects with a wide variety of cross sections and densities. The main idea is that an object should float in a fluid if the object's to fluid's density ratio is less than 1. A stable floating position should be where potential energy is at its lowest, and this can be plotted with the angle of the water line on the object. In OpenSCAD, the process begun in designing a silhouette for the floating object. In this case, Feh the Messenger Owl from the game Fire Emblem Heroes was the model. Defined by the polygon function and a series of points, the approximately 30x30 mm owl shape can be stretched up to 60 mm using the linear_extrude function. Any silhouette can be used, but small details can be included if you ignore uniform density requirement for this project. The set of points can also be used to calculate the local minima of potential energy relative to the angle with which the object floats in the water. In this case, there are local minima found at approximately at 80, 140, 180, 290, and 360 degrees, but in person the print has only been able to float stably in 2 and weakly stably in 1. Below is an external link to images illustrating this. This could be due to a limitation on mass estimates given by Cura, which affect the calculations of Potential Energy. The mathematics behind the project are not intensive. All one needs is the volume, which can be found using an STL inspector, and the mass, which can be estimated by slicing software. So long as the mass to volume ratio is less than 1, the object can float. Be creative, as the possibilities are endless. https://imgur.com/a/HvcePPT - Aforementioned external link to images.