For the given wrapped hyperbolic cosine curve,
so . The curve makes one full turn around the circular cylinder, descending from to and ascending to its initial point. Its two parameter endpoints coincide; their tangent vectors and do not agree, so the resulting closed curve has a corner there.
Figure 1.
The hyperbolic cosine curve wrapped around a unit circular cylinder, and the same surface unrolled
. The shaded finite patch extends from to . On the unrolled cylinder, its horizontal coordinate is ; the two vertical edges are identified. Details.
The velocity vector of the parametric curve is
Its speed is
where fixes the sign of the square root. Hence the arc length is
The coincidence of the endpoints does not duplicate any positive arc length.
Parametrize the finite cylindrical surface patch by
The surface area element is . The seam has zero surface area, so it causes no overcounting. Therefore
Unrolling the unit circular cylinder preserves surface area, which explains the equality with the area under the hyperbolic cosine in the figure. The patch consists of the cylindrical surface alone; no flat base is included.
At a fixed , both cylinder inequalities become
Thus the cross section is a square of side and area . Integrating these cross-sectional areas gives the volume of this bicylinder:
For the surface area of a tricylinder, permutation symmetry shows that each of the three cylindrical surfaces contributes the same surface area to the boundary. On the face , put , . The remaining two inequalities require
so . The surface area element on this unit circular cylinder is . There are eight congruent angular sectors, with the minimum equal to for . Thus the area of this face is
Every boundary point lies on at least one of these three cylindrical surfaces; their pairwise intersections are curves of zero surface area. Adding the three faces therefore gives

Articles by others on the same topic (0)

There are currently no matching articles.