• Jorn
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    9 months ago

    Ignore things like the bevel, wall thickness, etc. Just calculating for a basic right cylinder, you can see how the surface area changes for different heights with a constant volume. I’ve outlined the standard dimensions of a can(inches). https://youtu.be/gL3HxBQyeg0

    • @gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      219 months ago

      I had a feeling it’d math out something like that if I opened my fat mouth, lol

      I do wonder if thickness of the walls or lid/bottom does have an effect, though, as there must be some reason they make these weird ass cans

      • @Wogi@lemmy.world
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        109 months ago

        The lid uses more aluminum than the rest of the can, making that smaller will have a bigger impact than the height of the can.

      • Jorn
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        159 months ago

        In the grand scheme of things, it’s not using much more. And if the prices are correct in OP, the markup on the new can is way higher than any extra cost they are incurring from additional raw materials. They probably had some marketing study show that a taller looking can makes consumer’s less angry about a price increase or some other crazy nonsense.

      • @404@lemmy.zip
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        79 months ago

        there must be some reason

        Just a marketing trick IIRC, since energy drinks got popular and beer cans got unpopular among gen z.

      • @Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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        28 months ago

        pretty sure it just lets them fit more cans into the same box for shipping, same logic as how you can pack more sand into a box than you can pebbles

    • @daltotron@lemmy.world
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      18 months ago

      I always thought that narrower pressure vessels could contain higher pressure, because the curvature is more severe, meaning that for a vessel that needs to retain a similar level of pressure, you could just use less material in the walls of the vessel. Is this not the case with these new cans, and they have the same wall thickness, or is the tradeoff just one that still works out to be in favor of more total aluminum usage?

      • Jorn
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        8 months ago

        Force inside a cylinder vessel is just pressure times surface area. If you have the same pressure(soda carbonation) with more surface area, then you are putting less force on the walls. I don’t have any specialty in the materials engineering for canning, but i suppose less force on the walls means you could use thinner materials. However, soda can walls are already pretty thin to start with and from what I can find online, the tops are usually 2.5-3 times thicker. So, I could see it potentially cutting some cost from the tops by making them thinner but i doubt they are manufacturing different tops. It’s probably just marketing.