Thursday, July 7, 2011

Unit 7 Egg Drop


We relied on our knowledge of physics to craft a container that would protect our egg from falling ten meters and landing on cement. These are several factors involved: mass, velocity, momentum, dropping distance, falling time and the force of the fall. The goal is to have as small of a force as possible. More force is more damage to the egg. To figure this out we worked backwards, what determines the force? Well force is the change in momentum multiplied by time. To increase the time we wanted something that would cushion and absorb the fall and distribute the force over a longer period of time. The wheel like prism of our structure is made to collapse upon impact and absorb the force so the egg is unharmed. Momentum is a determined by the mass and velocity. Straws have a very low mass. Since they are so light they fall slowly with a low velocity. For all these reasons a straw cage worked well to protect our egg. I am very satisfied with the way our capsule turned out. Maybe something that could be altered is just scaling the size down so its smaller. Then it would have less mass. Although at the same time it would turn out to have less surface area to absorb the fall. So I'm not sure if that would be better or worse or make no difference really.

6 comments:

  1. yeeee best project nice conclusions too very similar to what I said

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  2. haha really? now what are the odds of that :p

    hey great job by the way:)

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  3. This was probably the most complex straw design ever made for this lab - how did you figure out where to tie/bend/put each straw?

    You are very bright to have come up with this design, Kim. Blake's grade lucked out when he partnered up with you haha LOL =P

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  4. haha actually the work was all blake, so I lucked out. but thank you

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  5. Your project was genius, pure genius... And I'm not going to lie, i had my doubts, but I'm glad it worked. It was awesome.

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  6. haha thank you, ya it kind of surprising looking

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