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Next: Question 2 Up: Lakes as Well-Mixed... Previous: Question 1
Aiee!

Sorry...

A sinusoidal function would mean that the input would fluctuate periodically, increasing and decreasing at regular intervals. This is clearly not what is happening in this case.

The gasoline will in effect enter the lake suddenly and as a blob. For all intents and purposes, no gasoline will enter after that time, the initial time we might call t 0. So the impulse input function, while a little simplistic, is a good approximation to our input in this case. The graph of an impulse input function is shown below so you can see how this fits our case.

Impulse Graph

Go on to Question 2 ->


John Hoggard <hoggard@math.vt.edu>
Last modified: Sun Aug 10 17:39:37 EDT 1997