Circumscribed Tetrahedron - 4 identical tangent spheres

Geometry Level 3

4 4 identical spheres, each of radius 2 2 are placed in space tangent to each other, i.e. each one is tangent to the other three. Now we want to circumscribe a regular tetrahedron about this set of spheres, such that each of its faces is tangent to 3 3 of the 4 4 spheres. Find the volume of this tetrahedron.


The answer is 309.583.

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1 solution

The centers of the spheres form a regular tetrahedron A B C D ABCD , with edge length a = 4 a=4 . The tetrahedron that contains the four spheres is a dilation of A B C D ABCD . The center of this dilation is the center O O of A B C D ABCD . We just have to find the scale factor r r of the dilation.
In the figure, O E OE is perpendicular to the base A B C ABC and extended meets the base of the image tetrahedron at H H . This extension has the length of the radius of the spheres, i.e. E H = 2 EH=2 Furthermore, O E OE is 1 4 \dfrac{1}{4} the height of A B C D ABCD , thus, O E = 1 4 D E = 1 4 × 2 3 a = 1 4 × 2 3 × 4 = 2 3 OE=\dfrac{1}{4}DE=\dfrac{1}{4}\times \sqrt{\dfrac{2}{3}}a=\dfrac{1}{4}\times \sqrt{\dfrac{2}{3}}\times 4=\sqrt{\dfrac{2}{3}} Hence, r = O H O E = O E + E H O E = 2 3 + 2 2 3 = 1 + 6 r=\dfrac{OH}{OE}=\dfrac{OE+EH}{OE}=\dfrac{\sqrt{\dfrac{2}{3}}+2}{\sqrt{\dfrac{2}{3}}}=1+\sqrt{6} For the ratio of the volumes of the tetrahedrons we then have V A B C D V A B C D = r 3 V A B C D = r 3 a 3 6 2 = ( 1 + 6 ) 3 4 3 6 2 309.5838 \dfrac{{{V}_{{A}'{B}'{C}'{D}'}}}{{{V}_{ABCD}}}={{r}^{3}}\Rightarrow {{V}_{{A}'{B}'{C}'{D}'}}={{r}^{3}}\dfrac{{{a}^{3}}}{6\sqrt{2}}={{\left( 1+\sqrt{6} \right)}^{3}}\dfrac{{{4}^{3}}}{6\sqrt{2}}\approx \boxed{309.5838}

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