Sylvie Barak, West Coast Online Reporter, EETimes
Once upon a time, there lived a mechanical engineer who pondered a question that has bothered intelligent, curious children for years.
Namely, what qualities would the glass in Cinderella's slippers need to have in order for her to walk and dance comfortably, and hold her weight?
Yes, that was a question answered by one Antariksh Bothale, a BTech and MTech in Mechanical Engineering, on question and answer site Quora this week. "It is delightful to have my masters degree in Mechanical Engineering put to use in resolving age-old engineering problems," wrote Bothale, before giving a thorough mathematical breakdown of the problem.
The question made me smile because it's one I used to ask my parents all the time. After all... the risks seemed huge! What if the glass broke and sliced through her foot? It seemed like such a ridiculous choice of footwear. "They were magic glass slippers," my mother used to say, exasperated by my relentless story hole poking. But that just didn't cut it for me. Bothale's answer, however, does.
"Whenever we design something that needs to bear force, we test for various possible modes of failure and try to ensure that our object is strong against all of them," he writes, before undertaking an analysis of the compressive stress on the slippers arising from Cinderella's weight, which he estimates at around 50kgs.
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