Activities

Home > Activity > Enjoy Fluid Experiments Lab. > Volume Measurement

Volume Measurement

Let's take a look!

Watch the video on YouTube.

What kind of experiment is this?

Experimental procedure and explanation:

  • Place a container filled with water on a weighing scale and press the reset button. (The display shows 0 g).
  • Add to the water the object whose volume you want to measure. Make sure that the object and its support wire do not touch the bottom.
  • Read the number displayed on the scale. If you read the unit “g” as “cm3,” then the number on the scale is the volume of the object.
  • The buoyant force is equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the body (Archimedes’ principle).
  • In this experiment, the water receives a force equal to the buoyancy acting on the object as a reaction force, and that value is displayed. Therefore, the number displayed is the weight of water having the same volume as the object. Since the weight of the water is read in grams, and the density of water is 1 gm/cm3, you can think of the displayed value as the volume in units of cm3.

[Keywords] Buoyancy
[Reference] “The Wonders of Flow” Japan Society of Mechanical Engineering, Kodansha Blue Backs pp. 48-51
Last Update:9.7.2013