The following is a small gallery
of demos for illustrating the disk method for volumes of solids of revolution.
These animations can be used by instructors in a classroom setting or by
students to aid in acquiring a visualization background relating to the steps
of disk method. Three file formats, gif, mov, and avi are available.
The gif animations should run on
most systems and the file sizes are relatively small.
The mov animations require the
QuickTime Player (version 5 or newer) which is a free download available by clicking here;
these file are also small. (The mov files may not execute properly in older
versions of QuickTime.)
The avi files were saved with
full frames uncompressed hence are quite large and thus are only offered in
a zipped form.
The collection of animations in
gif and mov format can be
downloaded; see the 'bulk' zipped download category at the bottom of the
following table.
Notes: The sequence of images in
the animations above follow a particular pattern. This pattern when viewed can
be adapted to form a script which can be
used to narrate the animation for a class or provide a guide for students to
viewing the animations on their own.
Sketch the curve y = f(x) over interval [a
,b]. Name the region to be revolved about the x-axis R.
Restriction: To use the disk method
to compute the volume of the solid obtained by revolving R about
the x-axis the region must be enclosed from top-to-bottom (or
bottom-to-top) by f(x) and the x-axis throughout the interval [a,b]. To
see examples of regions that meet this requirement and others that do not,
click here.
