Im a final year math student doing a project for a company. They want to do a cup-and-grid water drop test with a firefighting helicopter. The basic idea is: a grid of 1000cups is setup on an airfield, small groups of 9 cups are placed strategically in the grid to measure variance around sample points, a water-bombing helicopter flies over the grid and drops water, cups are then collected, weighted and data is gathered. The process is then repeated for different speeds, heights etc...
My issue is that there is a chance fire season could come early and helicopters might not be available so im asking for peoples ideas/experiences in this area (im inexperienced), what similar situations have you been in and what solution did you come up with?
What i have so far is this: code the grid of cups in R and then: step 1. allocate a volume of water to each of them according to a normal distribution. This would be as if an amount of water has been dropped from a height with no other variables involved. I can then graph the density and spread and if i think about how water disperses in real life when dropped it looks reasonable.
step 2. this is where im stuck add the effects of flight speed and flow rate out of the tank so that they influence the spread pattern and density. Generating this data so that its realistic kinda seems like a physics problem.
