Moment Analysis of Tracer Experiments

Abstract

For the estimation of moments from pulse-tracer experiments, prior workers have used trapezoidal rule integration as well as a generalized moment of inertia approach. In this technical note, these two methods are compared, and it is shown that the latter method produces biased estimators of the mean, particularly the variance of the residence time distribution, while the trapezoidal rule is substantially less biased under usual conditions. Therefore, the trapezoidal rule should be applied for the analysis of such data.