Surface-area-to-volume ratio Surface-area-to-volume ratio The surface-area-to-volume ratio, also called the surface-to-volume ratio and variously denoted sa/vol or SA:V, is the amount of surface area per unit volume of an object or collection of objects. In chemical reactions involving a solid material, the surface area to volume ratio is an important factor for the reactivity, that is, the rate at which the chemical reaction will proceed. For a given volume, the object with the smallest surface area (and therefore with the smallest SA:V) is the sphere, a consequence of the isoperimetric inequality in 3 dimensions. By contrast, objects with tiny spikes will have
Solid angle of a planar triangle is equal to "", for the sum of the four internal solid angles of a tetrahedron as follows: where ranges over all six of the dihedral angles between any two planes that contain the tetrahedral faces OAB, OAC, OBC and ABC. A useful formula for calculating the solid angle subtended by the triangular surface ABC where formula_17 are the vector positions of the vertices A, B and C has been given by Oosterom and Strackee (although the result was known earlier by Euler and Lagrange): where denotes the scalar triple product of the three vectors; When