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  • Why are food cans shaped the way they are?

    Ramani Aswath

    Ramani Aswath

    @ramani-VR4O43
    Updated: Oct 20, 2024
    Views: 1.3K
    One does not realize the amount of engineering design that goes into many things taken for granted.
    May be a can of beer (or tomato juice for teetotallers) can be opened to open the discussion.

    Quote:
    The purpose of a food can is to store food. It costs money to manufacture, store, and ship these containers. One would imagine, therefore, that over time a lot of thought has gone into their design and production.

    One would hope that, as billions of food and beverage cans are manufactured every year (yes, that's a “B”), the current designs are optimal for their purpose. If not, as a planet, we’re wasting a lot of energy manufacturing sub-optimal designs.

    So then why are cans cylindrical tubes? And why do they have the aspect ratios they do? (Ratio of height to diameter)
    Endquote
    <a href="https://www.datagenetics.com/blog/august12014/index.html" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Optimal Can Dimensions</a>
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  • Shreyas Sule

    Member • Jul 30, 2014

    The concept of an Optimizing function and its practical use are explained in an excellent manner. Usually, an optimum solution that gives a minima for the function under consideration has certain drawbacks. The optimum solution may not be always feasible due to boundary conditions. Sometimes it may be mathematically or physically impossible to implement. In this case of Can design, it is interesting to note that even though it is possible to have a perfect h/r ratio to minimize the wasted surface, this ratio is not always used by the manufacturers. This deviation from using a perfect h/r ratio is not because it is difficult to construct a Can of perfect h/r ratio but is influenced by other factors. Few of them mentioned by Nick Berry are aesthetics, cost of packaging material and the one I found amusing but true is familiarity! Even though a calculated Optimized solution may seem perfect remedy to a problem, sometimes its implementation depends on various non mathematical factors as well.
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