A Laboratory Experiment on How to Create Dimensionless Correlations

An experiment is described that illustrates how chemical engineering correlations are created. Balls of different diameters and different specific gravities (all less than one) are dropped from several heights into a pool of water, and the maximum depth reached by the ball is measured. This data is used to estimate the coefficients for a correlation developed through consideration of the underlying physics, and maximum likelihood techniques are used to estimate the experimental variance in these estimated coefficients.