Paper Towel Absorbency Experiment Write-Up
Purpose:
The purpose of this experiment is to conduct a valid experiment, realize that the way I conduct an experiment influences the data, and I want to know which paper towel has the higher absorbency times. My hypothesis is that bounty will be the quicker picker upper
Materials and Methods: As a class we chose that our control out of the brands provided (Bounty, Viva, Wal-Mart, and the School brand) would be the Schools brand of paper towel. The treatment I used was to drop one drop of water onto the paper towels using a pipette and I timed it until I saw the water had stopped spreading on the paper towel. To randomize our data we had a sheet of random numbers that we used and we had four cases of replication, which went like this:
• Rep 1: Bounty, School, Wal-Mart, Viva
• Rep 2: Wal-Mart, Bounty, Viva, School
• Rep 3: Viva, Wal-Mart, School, Bounty
• Rep 4: School, Viva, Wal-Mart, Bounty
Other materials we used besides the paper towels were:
• A pipette
• An iPhone stop-watch
• And a three inch by two inch piece of each paper towel
Results:
Figure 1: Average absorbency times
Conclusion:
Based on the results I received from my experiment my hypothesis was proven correct. Bounty was faster than the other brands ether dramatically or just by tenths of a second. Some things that could have affected my data though where the accuracies in my timing, or my visuals of the stop of the spreading of the water