Stability of a floating body: buoyancy, centre of gravity, metacentre

[richard.maddock]

I want to float a large spherical mass on water and have the flotation tanks submerged. The mass is spherical, about 2000kg, with its centre of gravity quite low down (ie not in the centre of the sphere):

However, I’m concerned that a strong wind could potentially make it flip. This would be bad. Very bad.

Has anyone done any work before with floating bodies, specifically their stability? I’m thinking of ways to increase the stability by either increasing the overall width of the flotation tanks:

or by adding a counterweight:

However neither of these solutions are that desirable. It would nice to be able to calculate and evaluate the effect these measures would have on the overall stability.
Any ideas most welcome.
Thanks!

[DanielPiker]

I think the definition here could be used for this

Sweep Plane until Lower Section has a certain volume

For a simple geometry like this I don’t think there’s any need to use Kangaroo - it can be a simple geometric calculation. If this is an example leading to more complex geometries though, here’s an example I made a while ago for simulating floating objects using Archimedes’ principle buoyancy_archimedes.gh (60.1 KB)

As the object has parts of very different density you’d need to account for that when finding the center of mass.