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
Capillary surface and that the most stable configuration can become metastable through mechanical jarring without too much difficulty. On the other hand, a metastable surface can sometimes spontaneously achieve lower energy without any input (seemingly at least) given enough time. Boundary conditions for stress balance describe the capillary surface at the contact line: the line where a solid meets the capillary interface; also, volume constraints can serve as boundary conditions (a suspended drop, for example, has no contact line but clearly must admit a unique solution). For static surfaces, the most common contact line boundary condition is the implementation of the contact