TIL: There is an 'optimal' soup tin Skip to main content
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TIL: There is an 'optimal' soup tin

I'm reading Atomic Accidets by James Mahaffey at the moment, and there's several times he references things "soup tin shaped" as being really bad for storing some types of nuclear fuel. This is because they maximise the volume to surface area ratio.

It got me thinking about soup tins and I found this article about the math behind optimal soup tin design. It's not quite as straightfoward as maximising the volume to surface area ratio.