Activity 4: Water Distribution

Activity 4: Water Distribution

Characterising a pump

           Have you ever wondered how the water in your taps, sink and showers get in to your homes? Well first we have to look at where all the water in the world are found.

            So as you can see there is only about 2.5% of freshwater on our planet. Then 68.8 % of that freshwater is frozen and another 30.1% are underground. The remaining freshwater found on the surface is all in our lakes and reservoirs. So now you know where the water comes from but how does it arrive in your homes? The answer to that question is pumps. Pumps Pumps all have different flow rates. Our Mechanical teacher for ED Mr. Tune thought us the way to obtain the characteristics of the pump, In order to obtain the characteristics of the pump we had to plot a graph of Head (H) which is height of the pump to the surface of the water against Mass flow rate (Q) which is the amount of water we collected in a certain amount of time.

            In order to get these information this we had to conduct an experiment. The following things were needed:

-1 Big Bucket

-1 Small Bucket

-1 Measuring Tape

-1 Pump

- 1 Pipe (1m long)

- 1 Stopwatch (On our Ipad/Phone)

Mass of the empty small bucket

The first thing we had to do was to find the maximum height of water our pump could pump.

The maximum height was about 60 cm.

Then we had to obtain the mass of water our pump could pump at intervals of 10 cm. We planned to conduct each test with the time limit of 60 sec.

Keeping track of the time

 To obtain the mass of the water we had to take our obtain the mass with the bucket with water and subtract the mass of the empty bucket.(All pictures with mass includes bucket mass)

At 50 cm

At 40 cm

At 30 cm

At 20 cm

At 10 cm 

At 0 cm

Finally its time to plot the graph

           

            So in order to plot the graph we needed to divide our mass by the time taken to get (Q). And plot (Q) against (H).

Our graph

Now that we were done with the pump its time for math!

After the pump experiment our Math Teacher for ED Dr. Xin Yi showed us how to find the best straight line using excel. As well as explaining what is correlation coefficient. Correlation Coefficient is basically how many points are on the best straight line. r ² is the percentage of total variations of the points on the line.

That's the end of this week activities. See you next week. Thanks for reading!