ABSTRACT
The ability to handle calculations involving circles and their properties is clearly essential in several branches of engineering design. Knowledge of calculations involving circles is needed with crank mechanisms, with determinations of latitude and longitude, with pendulums and even in the design of paper clips. This chapter discusses some properties of a circle – including radius, circumference, diameter, semicircle, quadrant, tangent, sector, chord, segment and arc. It aims to calculate arc length, area of a circle and area of a sector of a circle. A circle is one of the fundamental shapes of geometry; it consists of all the points that are equidistant from a central point. A circle is a plane figure enclosed by a curved line, every point on which is equidistant from a point within, called the centre.
