Dan Guerrero   dhg7482
Week: 11   7.4.6
http://http.tamu.edu/~dhg7482/math311/week11/7_4_6.html   #15


Find the flux of the constant vector field through the hemisphere

SOLUTION:
Hard Way:
The unit normal vector to the sphere is , where in this case. Now, let’s change over to spherical coordinates:

 

Our unit normal vector now becomes . Now we apply the rule for a general vector field in its surface integral through S is the scalar surface integral over S of the function


So this means:

We now multiply this by the element of surface area on the sphere (dS), which is and integrate over . Therefore, the flux is

We use the trigonometric identity to convert to:


Even Harder Way:
We do a full-scale parametrization of this problem as in Example 2 in Sec. 7.6. Again we change to cylindrical coordinates as above. We see that the flux integral can be found through this equation:
.
Each term is calculated like so: and everything else follows from that.

Therefore,

We substitute this into our equation:

 

We end up with the same integrand as before which checks out and we end up with the same answer of .