Egg Drop

My partner for this egg drop was Sho Matsumoto. The day before it took place, we were coming up with ideas. The requirements were that we can't use parachutes, the volume must be at most 35 cm • 35 cm • 35 cm, and the capsule must be ready to drop within 60 seconds of obtaining the egg (which means it must be ready in a minute after getting your egg).

An idea we came up with was to have a bungee rope attached to our egg. We got many, many rubber bands, cut them with sisscors so it was basically a rubber string, and triple knotted them all together. We guessed how much we should use because we didn't know how long it would stretch out to after being dropped. I brought in a tissue box because we weren't planning on dropping the egg just by itself attached to rubber bands and from it we took out all the tissues and wrapped it around the egg. The rubber bands would lessen the acceleration of the egg and therefore making the impact less great. Instead of dropping it from a 3 story building, by the time the rubber band would stretch all the way out and be at it's maximum, the egg would have slowed down to maybe only around half a story. From then once it slowed down we would release the cord and let it fall, at least we would of decreased the drop height of the egg.

In class, after talking to Mr. Blake we found out that our capsule didn't meet the requirements. Our bungee cord although could be held in the fist of your hand, it can also be several meters when stretched out (not meeting the 35 cm measurement). He told us that we could still test our bungee cord but we have to make a different system for the egg to depend on without the rubber bands. Using Matt's wrestling helmet, we placed towels in the curve inside of it and then stuffed our tissue box in. It looked like an upside down helmet with a tissue box in it. We came up with the idea really fast because we used most of our time trying to make the bungee jump.

As we dropped our egg off the third floor of Bishop, surprisingly our egg survived. It's landing from the helmet seemed to have made it bounced and I guess with all the cushion (tissue and helmet) supporting the egg from taking in all the force helped a lot. When watching the video of our egg test, we could see the helmet cushioning the drop really well, it spread out over the floor and took the impact. This helped lessen the force because it had a greater contact time (change in momentum = average force • change in time). After testing this capsule, we then used the bungee cord which didn't really work because we made the rubber bands too long. By the time it hit the ground, the cord could have still been stretched even more. I was really happy with our surviving egg that lasted through two drops but something that would definitely help the bungee idea would be to make our cord a lot shorter. I actually really want to see the bungee again with a shorter cord, I'm sure it would work a lot better.