Calculating Internal Volume in SOLIDWORKS

You may have come across several scenarios while designing where you want to calculate an internal volume of a model or determine how much liquid or gas can be contained inside. While doing the hand calculations is fun, we don’t have all day for that. Let’s look at an example of determining the internal volume of this bottle. We will start off by first setting up our fill line.

I’ve determined I want to check for internal volume in SOLIDWORKS in my bottle up to this fill line plane that I created. To determine the fill capacity of this bottle up to this plane, we will take advantage of the intersect feature.

Our selections for the intersect tool will be the bottle body, and the fill line plane. Make sure to check Create internal regions. The Intersect button will automatically create a set of selections for us. Click Intersect and Ok. Now you should have two separate solid bodies that were separated by the definition of the plane. These two bodies represent the internal regions of this bottle.

Finally, we can view our results by heading over to the solid bodies folder, and performing mass property calculations. Be careful that you are viewing the correct internal volume. In this example, I need to hide the head of the bottle and or just select the appropriate internal body region.

I see that my default units are set to cubic inches. What if I wanted to change this? Well, its quite easy since SOLIDWORKS 2016, we now have several units to choose from. Under options > document properties > custom > you can choose from a variety of units.