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Dining Services at Montana Tech works to provide students, faculty, and staff with food during
the school year. Consider the Marcus Deli in the SUB, the food it provides, and the people it serves.
First, let’s consider Friday lunch at the Deli. When the Deli opens, people (students, faculty, and
staff) begin to enter. After they finish their meal, they leave. When lunch is over, the Deli closes.
Let’s only think about the time that the deli is open. For this situation, describe the following:
Matter to be studied: People
System:
Process:
Draw a flowchart of the system/process. Label inputs and outputs.
REVIEW
System: A device/volume or combination of devices/volumes containing a
quantity of matter being studied
Process: Changes that occur within a system
Flowchart: A pictorial representation of a system/process
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(You could further break up the category “people” and consider students, faculty, and staff
separately. We will not do this in this exercise but think about why this may be helpful.)
If you were the director of dining services, you may be interested in things other than people. For
example, you may be interested in food, waste, money, staff, etc. Choose two items of interest and
fill out the following.
Matter to be studied:
System:
Process:
Flowchart:
Matter to be studied:
System:
Process:
Flowchart:
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Were you in charge of Dining Services, you would keep complex spreadsheets that describe
purchases (food, disposables, replacement dishes, equipment, etc.), person-hours for staff,
customers, and wastes. However, you can do some quick “Fermi estimations” to approximate
several of these things. Perhaps you will do this during the summer to help plan for the coming
semester. Remember, you are only concerned with the order-of-magnitude. For success, keep track
of units.
- Estimate the number of people that visit the Marcus Deli each week.
- Estimate the number of trucks needed to deliver food each semester.
- Estimate the number of dumpsters filled by food waste each week.
4 - Estimate the number of dumpsters filled by disposable items (to-go containers, plasticware,
etc.) each week. - Estimate the yearly operating budget for the Marcus Deli. Remember ingredients are not
the only cost.
In a day, approximately 750 people visit Marcus Deli. Two trucks of food are delivered each week.
Were your estimations close? Within one order-of-magnitude?
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Short Project
Locate an environmental engineer with an identity that you share. Prepare two slides (e.g.
Powerpoint) that describes the engineer, some of their major accomplishments,
systems/processes they studied, and other interesting facts about them. Include in your
description of systems and processes the concepts of system boundaries, closed/open systems,
black boxes, batch and continuous processes, and transient and steady state processes.
Sample Solution