Guttering Coursework
Question
A length of guttering is made from a rectangular sheet of plastic, 20cm wide. What is the best position for the folds so that the guttering carries the maximum amount of water?
1st Method
To find out the best place to fold two flaps on the 20cm sheet to find the best area. To do this we used trial and improvement so we went from 0 to 20 increasing the height by 2cm till we found the best area which was 10cm by 5cm we put the values into a table and then plotted a graph.
We then did it for a 30 cm sheet
We then tried to find a formulae that will find any area with x as the value this is what we found
X/4
X/2
2nd Method
We already had the angle the base and the side but we had to find out side x which was the extension at the top and side y which was the height of the triangle. To find side x we had to to use 5*sin*the angle to find y we did 5*cos*the angle. We then had to find one parallel side to do this we did x*2+10 and the 2nd parallel side was the base which was 10. We added them together divided by 2 and multiplied them by y. At first we used 10 cm as a base here is the graph and table with formulaes and table without:
