APPLICATIONS OF ORDINARY DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS

I. Population modelling
II. Radioactive decay

The half-life of a substance or a decaying material (or population) is the amount of time it
takes for 50% of the original amount of substance (or material or population) to decay.

Examples
1. Bismuth-210 has a half-life of 5.0 days.
a. Suppose a sample originally has a mass of 800 mg. Find a formula for the mass
remaining after t days.
b. Find the mass remaining after 30 days.
c. When is the mass reduced to 1 mg.

a.
The initial value problem for exponential decay

has particular solution

a. We need to find the relative decay rate k. After t = 5, the original population of 800
mg has decay to half of its original amount,

Using the decay equation, we have

 Substituting k = 0.1386 and P0 = 800 gives a formula for finding the remaining mass.

after 30 days.

b. We want t when P(t) = 1.

Thus, it takes approximately t = 48.2 days for the substance to decay to 1 mg.
2. Carbon-14 is a radioactive isotope of carbon that has a half-life of 5600 years. It is used
extensively in dating organic material that is tens of thousands of years old. What fraction
of the original amount of Carbon-14 in a sample would be present after 10,000 years?
3. A zircon sample contains 4000 atoms of the radioactive element 235U. Given that 235U
has a half‐ life of 700 million years, how long would it take to decay to 125 atoms?

III. Newton’s Law of Cooling

Examples
IV. Electrical circuits

Examples