Try it on paper first. A hint, the key idea and the worked solution are here when you need them.
Water runs into an empty tank through a valve that is opened slowly and then left alone. The flow first speeds up and then dies away, as the pressure in the supply pipe falls. A meter on the pipe shows that minutes after the valve starts to open, water is flowing in at the rate
The figure shows the graph of for the first minutes. The valve is never closed, so in principle water keeps coming for ever, but more and more slowly.
The amount of water that enters the tank between two times is the area under the graph of between them, so this problem is about the integral of . Integrate by parts, and take as the part to differentiate.
Give each answer to two decimals, with its unit.
Have you tried it?
Work it out on paper first. It is fine to get stuck or make a mistake: that is how we learn. When you are ready, go through the solution one step at a time, and check each step against your own.
(a), (b) . It is positive for and negative for , so the rate is greatest at . The greatest rate is .
The antiderivative. With and , so that : .
(c) .
(d) The average rate is .
(e) , and as . So the tank receives in all. More than half of it, about , comes in the first minutes.
Check. A grid search over million times in finds the greatest rate at , and numerical integration of gives the same and .
Watch out. The average rate is not the average of the rates at the two ends. That would be , which ignores how the rate rose and fell in between.
Log in to join the discussion.
Loading…