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#1 2009-04-12 01:31:31

Daniel123
Member
Registered: 2007-05-23
Posts: 663

Snow Ploughs

A lovely problem, taken from Advanced Problems in Mathematics, by Dr Siklos*

Two identical snowploughs plough the same stretch of road. The first starts at a time

seconds after it starts snowing, and the second starts from the same point
seconds later, going in the same direction. Snow falls so that the depth of snow increases at a constant rate
. The speed of each snowplough is
, where
is the depth (in metres) of the snow it is ploughing, and
is a constant. Each snowplough clears all the snow. Show that the time
at which the second snowplough has travelled a distance
metres satisfies the equation:
. Hence show that the snowploughs will collide when they have travelled
metres.

*He adds in his discussion that this can be generalised to n identical snowploughs smile

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#2 2009-04-12 04:13:25

JaneFairfax
Member
Registered: 2007-02-23
Posts: 6,868

Re: Snow Ploughs


When the first snow plough has been moving for
seconds, the depth of snow at the spot it has reached is
metres so its velocity would be
metres per second. The distance it has moved out would thus be
metres.

Thus, if it takes

seconds to move out to the spot
metres from the start point, we have

By the time the second snow plough reaches the same spot, another

metres of fresh snow would have fallen. Hence

   

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#3 2009-04-12 05:04:35

JaneFairfax
Member
Registered: 2007-02-23
Posts: 6,868

Re: Snow Ploughs

The solution to the differential equation is

Suppose the collision distance is

. The time that has elapsed since the snow started falling would be
for the second plough and
for the first plough.

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#4 2009-04-13 09:02:51

Daniel123
Member
Registered: 2007-05-23
Posts: 663

Re: Snow Ploughs

up

Last edited by Daniel123 (2009-04-13 09:04:21)

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