Volume of a Cylinder
A cylinder is one of the most major curvilinear geometric figures: the surface of the cylinder is formed by the points at a fixed distance from a given direct line, the axis of the cylinder. The solid enclosed by this surface and by 2 planes perpendicular to the axis is called a cylinder too. The surface area and the volume of a cylinder have been known since early antiquity.
In differential geometry, a cylinder is defined more broadly as any ruled surface spanned by a one-parameter family of parallel lines. The most common type of such generalized cylinders is given by certain quadric surfaces. A cylinder whose cross section is an ellipse, parabola, or hyperbola is called an elliptic cylinder, parabolic cylinder, or hyperbolic cylinder.
How to find the volume of a cylinder
The volume of a cylinder is found by multiplying the area of 1 end of the cylinder by its height.
Or as a formula: where:
Pi, approximately 3.142R is the radius of the circular end of the cylinder H height of the cylinder
Some notes on the volume of a cylinder
Recall that a cylinder is like an empty limonade can. It has nothing inside, and the walls of the could have 0 thickness. So strictly speaking, the cylinder has 0 volume. When we talk about the volume of a cylinder, we really are talking about how much soup it could hold.
Think of it this way: if you took a real, empty metal can and melted it down, you would end up with a small blob of metal. If the can was made of metal with 0 thickness, you would get no metal at all. That is what we mean when we say a cylinder has no volume.
The strictly correct way of saying it is "the volume surrounded by a cylinder" - the amount of soup it holds. But many textbooks simply tell "the volume of a cylinder" to mean the same thing. But this isn't strictly correct in the mathematical sense. What they often mean when they tell this is the volume surrounded by the cylinder.
Units
Remember that the radius and the height must be in the same units - convert them if necessary. The resulting volume will be in those cubic units. So if the height and radius are both in centimeters, then the volume will be in cubic centimeters.
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