How to calculate the volume of SAND & Aggregate in a Truck or Lory on a Construction Site | MS Excel

‪@krishnachiddarwar505‬ #construction #sand #civilengineering #crushsand
Hey everyone, today I wanted to make a video on how to measure any type of sand or any aggregate we receive on construction site for billing work. We usually receive these type of material in a truck or a hyva, which is a basically a vehicle that look like this (show a picture).
Let’s start with the easy stuff first, how do we measure the volume of a truck or a lorry
So if you have been on a construction site or have ever seen a truck or lorry, it looks something like this. And as you can see they are in a close to perfect block shape, by that I mean, there are no slopes on any of it’s edges. So it becomes easy to calculate the volume with the formula that is, length x breadth x height. Typical dimesons of a tata truck are 22 ft in length, 7.5 ft in width and 7 ft in height and if we multiply them, we get 1155 cu.ft and to convert it into Cubic meter we divide this value by 35.314 and we get 32.706 cum.
So this was the easy part, to calculate the volume of sand in truck or lorry.
Now, if you every receive your sand or aggregate in a Hiva, which would look something like this. It basically is a large truck with hydraulic jack and has a slope on this side (show in the picture). Also, sometime we receive a batch of material where the vehicle is overloaded and has this shape on top of it.
And since this vehicle is not in a perfect block form and has this irregular shape on top of it, we can not use our regular volume formula of length x breadth x height and for this we have a mathematical formula.
The Shoelace formula is a mathematical algorithm to determine the area of a polygon. For that purpose, we’ll need the coordinates of the vertices or corner. The formula would look like this (draw a picture of shoelace formula)
A is the area, n is the number of sides, x is x coordinate and y is y coordinate.
Now the big thing is finding the different points on this shape, to find the points 1, 2, 3 and 4 is easy as we know the dimension of the tipper. Top length is 5.5 m, bottom length is 4.5m, height is 1.7 m and width is 1.5m. From Pythagoras theorem we can find the length of slope and it comes to approx. 2m.
Coordinate of point 1 is (0,1.7), point 2 is (5.5,1.7), point 3 is (5.5,0), point 4 is (1,0). Now, the big question. How do we find out the coordinate of point 5 and 6. To find out the x coordinate, we simply use a tape and measure its distance from origin. To find out the y coordinate we insert a measuring rod at point 5 and point 6 and measure the height of hip at those points and that’s how we will have the x and y coordinate. Lets say coordinate for point 5 are (1,2) and for point 6, lets say (2.25,1.8)
Now, once we have the coordinate of all the points, we shall enter them in our excel file as shown. Point to note is, for our convenience, we’ve copied the 5th row our 1st point and pasted it again into the 11th row. This slight modification in the dataset will facilitate the formula application process and makes it easier to calculate the area in excel.
Once we have everything setup as discussed, simply enter the formula in cell D13. It starts with = 0.5 * ABS ( sum ( select C5to C10 * D6 to D11 – now select D5 to D10 * C6 to C11)) and hit enter
This area which we have gotten is in Square meter as all our coordinates are in meter. Now to calculate the volume of the filled truck we simply multiply the area with the width of our truck which is 1.5 meter. And we get the volume of sand in our truck, which is 12.86 cubic meter.
Now, in the end I want to discuss one other method of calculating the volume of truck or hiva. With this method you will be able to get the approximate volume, weather it be sand or any type of aggregate..
What we do is, we take the weight of the fully loaded vehicle and then deduct the weight of empty vehicle from it. After that what we have is the weight of sand or aggregate in the truck. Let’s say the net weight is 10,000 kg. We divide this number by the density of sand. And that is around 1650 kgs per meter cube. And we can easily find the volume of sand, 6 cum. Same way for aggregate, if we divide the net weight by 1500 kgs per cum, which is an approx. density of aggregate from 20 mm to 10mm. we get the volume of aggregate which is 6.66 cum.
And this is how we can calculate the volume of any type of material we receive on site. If there is any question related to the video, please let me know in the comment section thanks.!!