Real-Life Math
You're an industrial engineering technician at Tomato World, a food
processing plant that makes a variety of tomato products such as drinks, ketchups
and sauces.
Working at this plant means designing new equipment for
assembly lines as well as maintaining existing systems.
Math is an important
part of an industrial engineering technician's work. "We do a lot of calculations,"
says Al Lawrence. He is an industrial engineering technician. "We use math
skills for drawings. It can be something as simple as addition to quite complicated
calculations."
At this plant, you've been asked to design a very small
holding tank that will be used to add tomato juice to a product as it goes
along the assembly line. "We deal with volumes of liquids, gases [and] weights
for holding things up, and calculate masses for foundations," adds Lawrence.
It's
important that you design the correct size of container for the juice. You
must know how much a full and empty container will weigh, and how much the
liquid inside the tank will weigh.
The container you're designing is
going to hold tomato juice. This liquid has the same density as water. If
the container holds 24 fluid oz. of juice, how much does the juice in the
container weigh?
Things you'll need to know:
1 fluid oz. = 30 cubic
centimeters (cc's)
Density (in g/cc) = mass (in g) / volume (in cc's)
The
density of water is 1 gram per cc.