Calculating Material Used in a Cylinder of given Thickness

[you878]

When given a cylinder with radius, height and thickness, how does one go about computing the amount of material used in making the cylinder?

Initially I thought the amount would be:
Material=2\pi r^{2}t+2\pi r h t
where t is the thickness of the cylinder.

Looking at this equation however, I realized that by default (without given a thickness for the cylinder) one would assume a thickness of one. This didn't make sense to me, however, because a surface with unspecified thickness should have no thickness right?

Perhaps I am thinking about this in the wrong way.

 

[Vargo]

Your formula is good if t is small compared to r and h. Otherwise, a more precise method would be to calculate the volume of the solid cylinder V(r,h), and then subtract the volume of the empty space V(r-t, h-2t).