While developing my egg dropper to drop my egg into while working in the egg drop project I was thinking of what would generally cushion the egg and slow it down before it got to the bottom of the cup. I wanted to design a cup that had a process that the egg went through as it fell thought he cup. Each step of this process would slow the egg down more so that once it was done with every step the egg would stop moving. The first design that our group came up with was a design that had this method in 2 steps. There was a cone that would pinch the egg as it went down slowing the egg gradually, the cone was filled with paper shreddings to slow the egg on impact to the cone. At the very bottom below the cone there was a fail safe trampoline just in case the egg broke through the cone and hit the bottom too hard. Our second design had more separated steps which might or might not have been a good idea but it seemed to work pretty well. This design had straws at the top of the cup that the egg would pass through lowering its velocity and force before impact into the paper shreddings that were in the cup. From the beginning of the project to the end we changed our design and we had a different plan in our process. Our best design was probably the 2nd design with the straws on the top and paper in the bottom.
My most successful trial was probably my last one and even though the egg broke I still felt the most success afterwards. Before I dropped the egg I was really scared I was going to miss when I dropped the real egg because it was our last one. I started dropping fake eggs until I was making every one and sure I was going to make a real egg if I dropped one. What I didn't know was that while I was dropping fake eggs our cup broke twice, cracking on the side and all the paper shreddings got crushed down reducing their efficiency. I dropped the real egg at the very end of the class, I let it out of my fingers and watched if fall towards the cup. It looked like a perfect drop and it was. The egg fell straight though the middle of the straw layer and lost its speed a little but not enough. The egg left the straw layer and hit the crushed down paper shreddings. Since the paper shreddings were crushed down they didn't have as much potential to slow the egg down than if they were fluffed up. The egg cracked on the paper shredding and we were done with the project coming out with a B. in this project we had a lot of problems including minimal supplies and dropping the eggs. 2 of our eggs broke from bad drops, one had a guillotine fail and the other missed the cup completely. I dealt with this problem by practicing with a ton of practice eggs before I dropped a real one and this method seemed to work because on our last egg I had a perfect drop. I had also wished that that we could've used more supplies in this project just to make it a little more fun, I wanted there to be taller cups so that there could be more processes that the eggs went through as they went down thought the cup or tube. When we made a cup with the supplies we had the greatest amount of steps we could achieve was three, I wanted around 10-15. The things I used to improve my egg drop were coming up with different designs and dropping the eggs with more accuracy.
When the egg dropped it had and average speed of 5.27m/s, that means that it would leave your hand and hit the cup in less than a second if you where below 5.27m high. The egg will accelerate at about 12m/s/s so that means it will keep speeding up on its way down until it hits your cup. If you decrease the force of the egg which is approximately .78m/s/s*kg, to fast then the egg will crack. You want to design your egg catcher to decrease the eggs speed and force as fast as possible but not fast enough to crack the egg, if you did that you would have the perfect egg catcher. Our egg catcher decreased the force of the egg to fast so the egg cracked.
I thinks that momentum and force played major roles in this project because you built your egg catcher around the rules of momentum. You wanted to decrease the momentum of the falling egg slowly so that the egg wouldn't crack. To do this you had to understand what momentum was and also understand how to use it to your advantage, this is the same idea with force.
There where many forces that where acting on my egg as I dropped it from my hand to the egg dropper. One of the main forces was gravity which pulled my egg towards the egg catcher at the bottom of the drop. The force of gravity also made it so that momentum and acceleration where acting on my egg also. Acceleration made force act upon my egg as well as speed. At the bottom of the drop there was impact which was also force. Air resistance applied friction as the egg went down. Gravitational forces of the earth also had a very very very slight affect. The gravity coming off of masses of objects most greatly the earth affected the drop. Many forces most of them that we can't test or see with the eye or machines where at work when I dropped the egg.
