Volume Conversions vs. Metric Conversions

Metric system is an international system of measurement. It is also known as System International d'Unites (SI). It is formed of three basic units; meter (m) for length, kilogram (kg) for mass and second (s) for time. These three units can be used to measure everything in the world. Metric conversions are used for converting different measurement system units to SI units and to convert SI units to any other system.

Conversions

Metric conversions can be used to convert temperature, length, area, weight and volume units to the standard SI unit and vice versa. Volume conversion is just a part of metric conversion. It is used if the quantity to be converted is a volume.

Units

The seven major quantities used in metric conversion are length, mass, time, electric current, temperature, amount of substance and luminous intensity. The units used for these quantities are meter, kilogram, second, ampere, Kelvin, mole and candela, respectively. Volume is derived from the base quantity, length. Volume is length*length*length; here * stands for "multiplied by." Thus volume = length cubed, or to the third power. The SI unit for volume is cubic meters, written as "m cubed." A cubic meter is equal to 1,000 liters. So 1 liter = 1/1000 m cubed. So, volume conversion uses l or m cubed as the standard unit. You can use prefixes in both volume and metric conversions. The prefixes are powers of 10. If you prefix, k to m, then you change meter to kilometer, where 1 k = 10 cubed.

Formulas

Metric conversions include a number of combinations of conversions for all quantities like miles to kilometers, pounds to kilograms, inches to centimeters, etc. Different formulas calculate all these conversions. For example, if you want to convert miles to kilometers, multiply the value in miles by 1.60934. In the case of volume conversions, some possible combinations are gallons to liters, cubic feet to cubic meters, cubic feet to cubic inches and cubic feet to liters.

Uses

Metric conversion is used to convert quantities like weight, length, and area to standard SI units and also do the reverse conversions. Volume conversion is used to convert volume to standard SI units and also vice versa. Now many volume and metric converters are readily available, where you have to just enter the value to be converted and the source and destination units. The converter will do the conversions using the appropriate formula and give you the result (see Resources).