Show that the formula for the surface area of a sphere with radius r is 4pi r^2. b) If a portion of the sphere is removed to form a spherical cap of height h then then show the curved surface area is 2 pi h r^2?
Lara Browning
Answered question
2023-03-13
a) Show that the formula for the surface area of a sphere with radius r is . b) If a portion of the sphere is removed to form a spherical cap of height h then then show the curved surface area is ?
Answer & Explanation
Emencisydeessyo2
Beginner2023-03-14Added 2 answers
A sphere's area element has a constant radius r and two angles. One is longitude , which varies from 0 to . The other one is the angle with the vertical. To avoid counting twice, that angle only varies between 0 and . Thus, the area element is Integrated over the whole sphere gives
In part b, varies between and which is such that Thus Every other derivation of this result that I found uses cylindrical coordinates and is far more involved than this one.
smakkie8iz
Beginner2023-03-15Added 5 answers
Spherical coordinates are more convenient to use than cylindrical or rectangular coordinates. This solution appears lengthy because I have broken down each step, but it can be computed in a few lines of code. With spherical coordinates, we can define a sphere of radius r by all coordinate points where (Where is the angle measured down from the positive z-axis), and (just the same as it would be polar coordinates), and ). The Jacobian for Spherical Coordinates is given by And so we can calculate the surface area of a sphere of radius r using a double integral:
where
When we look at the inner integral, we get:
Thus, our integral becomes:
QED By trigonometry , and so we must restrict to , which gives us: