Quartz 5

Design Challenge 1 - Egg Drop Challenge

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tagsuniversity, geng1010, engineering, reflection, assignment

2 min read

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Headers for Reflection

  • Client Briefing
  • Materials
  • Your Design
  • Team’s Design
  • Final Design
  • Testing
  • Final Results
  • Reflection on Team Effort

Plan

  • Overview of client briefing
    • Drop an egg from an 8 metre drop
    • Have the egg survive the fall
    • Design lands within designated area
    • Design is reusable
  • Two goals:
    • Drag + increase time of impact
      • Mathematically can be expressed in reducing Ek and increasing time that Ek falls to 0
    • Proof that reducing speed has a greater effect on reducing kinetic energy (as shown by equations)
  • Discussions:
    • Which part of the egg is most durable
    • Budget constraints
  • My two proposed designs:
    • Parachute + paper cups for crumple zones
    • Pyramidal straw mesh
      • Concerns about straw length, cost of tape
    • Paper cup taped to balloon
      • Centre of gravity concerns
  • Team’s proposed designs:
    • Paper parachute
      • Budget concerns → decided paper better option than bag
    • Balloons
      • Excellent choice due to increase in drag and increased impact absorption
      • Chosen as final design
  • Testing
    • Tested straw mesh and balloons
    • Found that because of budget constraints that it was better to use paper ‘pipes’ over the available straws
      • But the resulting structure was finicky to assemble and small
      • It is better to build multiple pyramids enclosed in one another to increase the impact absorption
      • Design was ruled out
    • Balloons had excellent drag, increasing fall time to a leisurely glide
      • Egg was initially secured using tape → switched for rubber bands which were more secure, wouldn’t fall off and easier to load egg into
  • Final results
    • Design fell slowly and egg was completely unharmed
    • None of the balloons popped and due to everything being tied together, the structure was fully intact
    • The balloons did fly away in the wind away from target zone
      • Large vertical width made the balloons get carried by wind
      • Light weight also makes the structure easy to blow off course
  • Reflection on Team Effort

Images for Slideshow

  • Free body diagram sketch
  • Calculations
  • Egg structure diagram
  • All of my planned designs
    • Sourced image of straw pyramid
    • Crumple zone diagram
  • Final design (built)
  • Final video

Graph View

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