Sunday, February 12, 2017
Conservation Laws and Defining a System
My previous post being about conservation of population, I wanted to actually get into detail in how I would design my system and conservation law. First I would define my system to be an open system since mass (people) would be allowed to travel in and out of the system. The boundary would be of a small city or town. I could to a whole country but a city would work since it would have much higher mass flow rates considering traveling through cities are more common than countries. This conservation of population would be based off the conservation of mass flow since it's basically how people travel through cities. This can be observed by tolls, having a toll whenever someone would cross to another city and then tallying them up to see how much people travel in and then out. An example could be Philadelphia. Many people come from New Jersey, Washington DC, New York, and Baltimore go to Philadelphia. Even on holidays people visit their families and it could be in any of those locations outside Philadelphia. I've met some people that come from other areas that have to take the train of drive in order to get to Temple University. They end up going back home and I think that is a perfect example of conservation principles. However, if I couldn't use toll booths as a way to measure the amount of people coming in and out of the city then I would create a matrix to solve for those variables. I would set up how much people travel through trains, cars, and maybe even planes. How many times does a train maybe even a train from New York to Philadelphia arrive each day. Then by setting up the car, train and plane equations then I could find how much people can fit in a train or car or plane then set it up in a matrix of 3x3 and solve. the answer would come out in a 3x1 showing how much people would actually travel per year or month and add them up to find the amount coming in. Do the same for the amount of people coming out and hopefully finding out they are very similar.
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I think you did a really good job of defining your system clearly. There are still challenges that would occur but it would give a rough estimate.
ReplyDeleteAs someone who often commutes I completely agree that you could do this and in fact I'm pretty sure the Department of Transportation does this. They try to figure out on average how many trains or buses are needed to handle the amount of migration in and out of the city. Its interesting when you get the one exception of a holiday, it throws off the average amount of people coming in and out of city so they usually neglect it and create a different set of equations just for that.
ReplyDeleteThat's a cool concept. I actually never thought of it that way. What about the people within the region that are coming in and out of the city from suburbs, neighboring cities etc..
ReplyDeleteThat is one thing i have discovered in engineering. You cannot just directly apply an equation given in class to solve a problem in real life because you will have to consider the abnormalities and factors which do not make the problem uniform. so there always has to be assumptions. In that way we can get people traveling from neighboring cities
ReplyDeleteThat might be an easier way of doing the project, maybe I should have done this topic. If I could have found some data from a transportation area or google it, this project could have been pretty easy. The amount of people coming in and out of a station, or if I can find how much cars go through toll booths. I ended up finding a article about this. http://www.doughroller.net/personal-finance/how-much-is-collected-at-toll-booths/ Read through it if you find yourself with extra time but it describes the people coming into NYC from a toll booth. I think it would be a difficult topic but interesting.
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