CHE555 NUMERICAL METHODS AND OPTIMIZATION

ASSIGNMENT 1 (10%)

Question 1
You are designing a spherical tank (Figure 1) to hold water for a small village in a developing
country. The volume of liquid it can hold can be computed as

3
2
= ( )
3
Where V = volume (m3), h = depth of water in tank (m), and R = the tank radius (m).

Figure 1
If R = 3m, to what depth must the tank be filed so that it holds 30m3? Use three iterations of
the false position method to determine your answer. Determine the approximate relative error
after each iteration. Employ initial guesses of 0 and R. Verify your answer by substituting the
results into the original equation.
(15 marks)
Question 2
The concentration of pollutant bacteria c in a lake decreases according to

c = 70e-1.5t + 25e-0.075t

Determine the time required for the bacteria concentration to be reduced to 9 using
a) The graphical method
b) Newton-Raphson method with an initial guess of t = 10 and a stopping criterion of
0.5%. Verify your result.
(15 marks)

Question 3
An electronics company produces transistors, resistors, and computer chips. Each transistor
requires four units of copper, one unit of zinc, and two units of glass. Each resistor requires
three, three, and one units of the three materials, respectively, and each computer chip
requires two, one and three units of these materials, respectively.

Component Copper Zinc Glass

Transistors 4 1 2
Resistors 3 3 1
Computer chips 2 1 3

Supplies of these materials vary from week to week, so the company needs to determine a
different production run each week. For example, one week the total amounts of materials
available are 960 units of copper, 510 units of zinc, and 610 units of glass. Set up the system
of equations modelling the production run and solve for the number of transistors, resistors
and computer chips to be manufactured this week by using Naive Gauss elimination.
(20 marks)