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
Steinmetz solid observation that the tricylinder can be resampled by the cube with the vertices where 3 edges meet (s. diagram) and 6 curved pyramids (the triangles are parts of cylinder surfaces). The volume and the surface area of the curved triangles can be determined by similar considerations as it is done for the bicylinder above. The volume of a tricylinder is and the surface area is With four cylinders, with axes connecting the vertices of a tetrahedron to the corresponding points on the other side of the solid, the volume is With six cylinders, with axes parallel to the diagonals of