Calculating the volume of a corner cut from the base of a right circular cone

46 Views Asked by At

I'm trying to find the volume of some arbitrary concrete tetrapod (the things they use to break waves on a beach) and I've broken the problem into a few parts. There's the 4 partial cones and the tetrahedron in the middle (both easy to find), but the thing I'm struggling with is the volume of the overlapping "corners" between the cones.

Image of a tetrapod 3D model

Image showing the "corners"

I've managed to find similar questions about cutting a cone with a vertical plane and finding the volume of a cone using parabolic slices, but in this case I'm dealing with elliptical sections. My current thinking is to maybe use triple integrals in cylindrical coordinates or something, but I have no clue how to set that up.

To give some specifics: each partial cone in the model I've got has an equal diameter and height of 1 with a side slope of 4 (so ~14 deg, but this angle was sort of arbitrary and can be changed a bit if that would make calculations easier). The angle between cones is acos(1/3) (~109.5 deg).

My 3D modelling program gives a total volume of 1.797 units^3 and the volume of a single corner as 0.009 units^3 (this is as accurate as I can get, I think), but ideally I'm looking to make some sort of formula to find volume for a given base diameter.