How do you find out how many small circles you can fit in a big circle? Like in a circle of radius 1cm how many 0.25cm circles can you fit? Is there a general relation?

2/22/2009 4:04:44 PM

That's called a "circle packing problem"

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/CirclePacking.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_packing_theorem

[Edited on February 22, 2009 at 4:17 PM. Reason : ..]

2/22/2009 4:15:53 PM

Perfect! thanks!

2/22/2009 4:30:32 PM

Is this a heat exchanger problem? In 412 we had to size a shell knowing the number of tubes and we never really figured out how to solve it beyond an estimation, but we were dealing with like 2200 tubes.

2/22/2009 4:44:22 PM

No this is a filter problem.. I'm trying to figure out how many holes with a radius of 1e-6m will be there in a filter with a radius of 1 cm.. In a diamond configuration...

2/22/2009 11:35:35 PM

if there can be partial holes, it's a different story, you just want the percent of open area:

http://www.mcnichols.com/products/perforated/resources/calcPercOpen.html

2/23/2009 9:57:22 AM