Volume Measurement of Irregularly Shaped Objects

How can you measure the volume of an irregularly shaped thing (e.g. humans), aside from putting it in a tub of water and measuring the displaced water?
- Muhammad iqrar (age 17)
pakistan

If you know some intensive property such as density (measure the total mass) or specific heat (use a calorimeter to measure the absorbed heat to increase temperature), you could exploit one of those. Thanks to the advancements in the technology, you can nowadays use a to get a digital model of objects. As soon as you know the surface contour, the rest is some mathematics to calculate the encapsulated volume. You could most simply count the number of enclosed volxels and multiply by the voxel volume, which should be good enough for small enough voxel dimensions compared to object size. Some improvement could perhaps be made by fitting a 2D function around the acquired contour and taking a 3D integral.

Tunc

(published on 04/29/2015)