ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Greenhill formula

Greenhill formula is a super cool way to predict the resistance of a ship moving through water. It helps people who make ships pretty sure if their designs will work well or not. To understand this formula, let's imagine we are playing with boats in a bathtub.

Now imagine you have a big boat, and you want to make it move through the water. You use your hand to push it, and as it moves, the water it's pushing away creates a force that resists the boat's movement. That force is called "drag," and it makes the boat feel like it's trying to move through glue.

The Greenhill formula helps us figure out how much drag the boat will experience based on how big it is and how fast it's going. It's like a special calculator that ship designers use to do some math and predict how much resistance the boat will have.

The formula takes into account different factors, but the most important ones are the "length" and "speed" of the boat. The longer and faster the boat is, the more drag it will experience. If the boat is really short and slow, it won't have much drag and will move quickly through the water. If the boat is long and fast, it will experience a lot of drag and won't be able to move as quickly. It's like when you ride a bike: if you pedal slowly, you can't go very fast, but if you pedal really fast, you can go much faster.

So that's what the Greenhill formula does. It helps people who make boats to predict how much resistance the boat will have based on how long and fast it is, and that way they can make sure their designs will work well before they even build the boat!