Our next challenge in physics is to build an egg glider. Our initial ideas were we had to build a basket of some sort to protect the egg because not only does our egg glider have to glide, when it lands, the egg can not have any cracks. This was the hard part because we're only given four different types of materials, a table length of tape, 25 straws, scissors and a sheet of newspaper. Different ideas were brought up as the wider the area, the more force is spread and the force won't be concentrated on the egg, causing it to break. Although this was a good idea, it was hard to achieve because not only did we have to build the protection for the egg, we needed to build wings for the glider.
For the wings we decided if we made them bigger it would be better, but Mr.Chung warned us if we made our wings too big, it would easily get damaged. A lot of our glider sketches in my opinion looked like a kite.
We drew rough sketches of different combinations and we decided we would build a large wing and in the center, we would attach the egg "basket" containing the egg. For the basket, we would either make a chamber cutting the straws in half the using them to make the sheet and wrap it or make a cone shape.
It was very difficult to come up with ideas because of the limit of materials. We couldn't use too many straws on either the basket or the glider. So at the end of the class we had a rough sketch of what we wanted to build but we weren't sure if it would be possible to build.
Our egg glider sort of resembled an airplane so when searching up aerodynamics i used this website for a basic understanding of how airplanes work:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/airplane1.htm
what i realized was this is actually really difficult because lift=weight and drag=thrust. This means the the top and bottom area of the plane and front and back must be equal to keep up the plane. If we incorporated that idea into our plane, it would be really difficult because the egg would definitely be heavier than the glider structure making it unbalanced.
To get an overall understanding of simple aerodynamics and how it works in a car:
http://www.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/fuel-economy/aerodynamics.htm
I learned about air resistance: forces acted upon a moving object by the far, also known as drag
and the idea of how air and wind are kind of like a wall on a really windy day and you're trying to move through it at a high speed. Although we weren't building it based on a car and it moving at high speeds, it was interesting to learn about that.
Hey, nice blog, i'm a student of AY Jackson and also have Mr. Chung for earth and space science, thanks for the info, did it work in the end? Do you still have a blueprint or remember the way it looked? Any suggestions? Thanks!
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