Spreading rate of spilled liquid. A contract engineer at DuPont Corp. studied the rate at which a spilled volatile liquid will spread across a surface (Chemical Engineering Progress, Jan. 2005). Suppose that 50 gallons of methanol spills onto a level surface outdoors. The engineer uses derived empirical formulas (assuming a state of turbulence-free convection) to calculate the mass (in pounds) of the spill after a period ranging from 0 to 60 minutes. The calculated mass values are given in the table below and saved in the LIQUIDSPILL file. Is there evidence to indicate that the mass of the spill tends to diminish as time increases?
