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The volume element in cylindrical coordinates

What is dV in cylindrical coordinates? Well, a piece of the cylinder looks like



so $\Delta V \approx (r \Delta \theta) (\Delta r) (\Delta z)$ which tells us that

\begin{displaymath}
dV = r dr d\theta dz.\end{displaymath}

We can basically think of cylindrical coordinates as polar coordinates plus z.



Vector Calculus
8/20/1998