A tricky intigration for rotational inertia

blahman
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Homework Statement


alright, so I'm trying to find the rotational inertia of a urethane longboard wheel, and i need to integrate a section of it that looks like a truncated annular cylinder that looks something like this if you cut it in half

attachment.php?attachmentid=26409&stc=1&thumb=1&d=1276221948.jpg




Homework Equations


just to be sure that i don't plagiarize or anything, i was hoping for more of a hint instead of a straight up answer if possible... question mark


The Attempt at a Solution


i first derived the equation for the rotational inertia of an annular cylinder (I=(1/2)M(R1^2+R2^2), then i used M=(density)V to find the mass, but i can't find the density unless i dump the wheel into a wet measure filled with water, and i really don't want to do that.

any ideas?
 

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Your drawings look like you have a cylinder and then you removed a cone from it, so you can get the inertia like that.
 
actually i figured it out, it just turned out that i needed to dunk the wheel in water no matter what. eh, all in the name of physics i guess
 
Why not just put it on a scale and weigh it to find the mass?
 
To solve this, I first used the units to work out that a= m* a/m, i.e. t=z/λ. This would allow you to determine the time duration within an interval section by section and then add this to the previous ones to obtain the age of the respective layer. However, this would require a constant thickness per year for each interval. However, since this is most likely not the case, my next consideration was that the age must be the integral of a 1/λ(z) function, which I cannot model.
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