Work problem: Pumping gasoline from cylindrical tank 4' below ground

spoon737

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I just worked through the following problem, and I was hoping someone could verify whether or not my answer is correct:

The top of a cylindrical storage tank for gasoline at the service station is 4 feet below the ground level. The axis of the tank is horizontal, and its diameter and length are 5 feet and 12 feet, respectively. Find the work done in pumping the contents of the full tank to a height 3 feet above ground level.

I've attached my work, which is admittedly sloppy with my steps in a weird order (I'm hoping you're able to make sense of it). The problem didn't state the density of gasoline, but after a google search and a quick conversion, I found it to be 44.928 lb./ft.^3. I use this value in my work. Also, my attachment doesn't include a visual of the problem, so I'll describe my approach. I oriented my coordinate axes with the origin at the center of the circular cross-section of the tank. This would imply that the gas is being pumped to a point 9.5 feet above the origin. When I evaluate my integral, I first split it into two integrals, then evaluate each using the fact that one represents the area of a semicircle, and the other is the integral of an odd function on an interval centered at zero (and hence, equals zero). The answer I ended up with was 3,218,116.824 ft.*lbs.

I'm not feeling uncomfortable with any of my steps, I would just like another pair of eyes to go over this and see if I made any mistakes anywhere (even in the basic number crunching). Thanks!
 

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The top of a cylindrical storage tank for gasoline at the service station is 4 feet below the ground level. The axis of the tank is horizontal, and its diameter and length are 5 feet and 12 feet, respectively. Find the work done in pumping the contents of the full tank to a height 3 feet above ground level.

I've attached my work, which is admittedly sloppy with my steps in a weird order (I'm hoping you're able to make sense of it)....

attachment.php
Unfortunately, the image is too small for me to be sure of much of the contents. Sorry! :oops:
 
I did what I could to read your picture by enlarging it; it looks reasonable on the whole, except that I'm not sure I recall my physics correctly with regard to the units involved. (Do you treat pounds as a unit of force, or as a unit of mass and convert to some other unit of force? I'm not sure where g properly fits in there; the units don't seem to work out to give pound-feet.)

You can check your work by calculating the amount of work it would take if all the gasoline were located at the depth of the center of the tank (and then ponder the result you get!).
 
I spotted an error

Dr. Peterson,

I looked it over again and saw that my use of g was in error. I was incorrectly treating weight as mass and multiplying by g (acceleration due to gravity) to obtain force. I somehow missed the fact that by working in lbs., I was already looking at the force I needed, so multiplying by g was unnecessary. This meant that my result was 32 times the correct answer, which I've now determined to be 100,566.15 ft.*lbs.

Thanks for the response!
 
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