Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Egg drop challenge Iteration #1

2) Total # of achievments: 23
 3)
 4)

our totall weight was 24 gram with out the egg and could also fit inside of a cigar box so we earned 3 more points there.
 We earned 3 achievments for hitting the 2nd ring of the target.
Our egg cracked but remained in good form only minor damage no massive breaking so we earned 3 points
We used geometrey and algebra/physics to calculate projections for our project as shown in the pictures earning 2 more points we also earned 3 points for sketchs and 2 points for material planning.



5)Designs with paracutes were very affective and mostly got the egg securly but i did like our design and thought it yielded good results except for the egg cracked because I threw our apparatus at the target instead of dropping it (I was going for speed). I think we could have tried to make our design smaller and more padded. We could have also worked on our launching to make the porduct more accurate

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Glider challenge

1.
Final Glider


2. Design Phase

1) The challenge is to create a glider using balsa wood and tissue paper. We have to make a glider that will hopefully glide the longest for the greatest amount of distance and most hangtime, if not both then it should do one of those things.

2) There are no rules to brainstorming. We went through all possible ideas and considered what would be the best approach to create the best design. We took ideas from the gliders around the class and we went online to look up ways in which the most efficient gliders are built, we then took these ideas to help create our own. Our idea was to create a glider with a short glider with long wings, angled up at 15 degrees and curved at the tips to reduce turbulance, then put two horizontal fins as well as one vertical fin. We ended not being able to to curve the wings because the wood would bend enough, also we ended up not being able to angle thie wings also, so we had to just put them flat, and we couldn't put a vertical wing because of lack of material.

3) Criteria: We had to use the material, the blasa wood and tissue paper, nothing else, and had to use glue and tape to stick things together, nothing else.

Constraints: The criteria really limited our creativity because we couldn't just use any material we wanted which limited what we could do.


4)

3. Test Phase

+
1.       Solid flight
2.       Ok distance
3.       Good wing hole

Outcomes to change
1.       Try to lengthen flight time
2.       Try to lengthen flight distance
3.       Try to decrease the size of the plane

?
1.       Short flight time
2.       Lack of controllable direction

Ideas
1.       Increase stability of the plane
2.       Decrease the size of the plane’s wings
3.       Increase amount of tissue paper


Our main goals for our glider our to increase the distance it can go and I think decreasing the wing size and using more tissue paper and trying to add stability to the wings are our main goals.
4. Performance and Improvements
Our glider did not perform very well at all, it dropped immediately and went backwards. I i think a lot of it had to do with the wings, the wings needed to be much shorter because they were to heavy and caught too much wind, the shape of the wings need to be changed because they weren't efficient, and lastly the wings were not supported right they were to flmsy. Also we needed to put on a vertical fin, that would have helped a lot.