Humpty Dumpty...sat on the third floor of bishop?

Today was our egg drop day, Brandon and I were partners and guess what...OURS SURVIVED! Our design was actually quite simple. It involved three car washing sponges, some fishing line, a circular sponge-like thing and a big bag of packing peanuts. We put the egg into the circular sponge-like thing then stuck it in the middle of the tree car washing sponges. We made a triangular shape and wrapped fishing line around them to hold it in place. Then we put this whole thing into a safeway bag full of packing peanuts then wrapped duct tape around the bag. Finally we put very small holes in the bottom of the bag so that air could go through the capsule. This is a drawing of our project.

I am not a good drawer.

I think that this worked because of physics, we were able to make the contact time longer therefore the force is less. We managed to make our design light so that it reached its terminal velocity faster. There were two forces acting on our capsule, these were weight or gravity and air friction. Here is a force diagram of our capsule.

Force Diagram

Plan of our capsule

Some things that we could have changed is the bag that we put it in. When the bag was being dropped some of the peanuts fell out. I do not think this really effected it but we could have sealed the bag better so it would be less clean up after. Also when it was falling the bag actually hit the railing. Basically I think that it worked best because we were able to use only soft items that would not damage our egg. By using soft items the weight of the capsule was less making the terminal velocity happen faster. One thing that confused me was that at the bottom it did bounce. When we did equations the bouncing always made the force more therefore when I saw it bounce I assumed that egg would have cracked. If I was to redo this I would make it so that the capsule would land with no bounce.

Final Product

Proud Brandon with our capsule.

The circular sponge-like thingy with our egg.