Pipeline Problems

by Jonathan Mull

Submitted : Fall 2014

The goal of my project is to accurately find how much ethylene is being delivered to company B from company A. To do this, I plotted the mass to the time and made multiple trendlines. The trendlines are in different magnitudes starting with linear, polynomial of power 3, and a polynomial of power 6. After getting the formulas for the trendlines for both companies, I integrated the formulas and evaluated them on the interval [1,24]. After taking Company B’s value from Company A, the remainder is the amount of ethylene that company A said they sent but company B did not receive. 

 After integrating the trendline formulas and finding the differences between company A and company B’s ethylene export/import it is possible to compare the results to the actual amount of ethylene Company A did not send. It was observed that the trendline with polynomial power of 3 was the closest to the actual amount and the polynomial of power 6 was the furthest. This polynomial was then used in Simpson’s Rule formula to obtain a more accurate result which only slightly increased the accuracy.

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