Write Up - Egg Drop

1) Explain clearly and concisely the physics involved, and why your capsule will work.

We thought that our capsule would have worked because we had a not one but two crumple zones. These crumple zones should have increased the time of impact greatly. We also had the egg encased in jello which should have helped to decrease the amount of force on the egg during impact. We also considered that because the egg could fall any direction we tried to cover the entire capsule with a stuffed soft bear. We did not consider that the capsule would hit the ground on its one weak spot.

2) Show the forces that were exerted on the capsule and egg during the impact with the ground.

The forces exerted on the capsule and egg during impact were normal force and  0.5kg x 9.8m/s = 4.9N we thought by lessening the impulse we could protect the egg even better. However the egg could only fall on five on the six sides. If it didn't the egg would surely break.

3) Do a "post-lab" and prepare a "damage assessment" explaining in detail, including the relevant physics, about why it worked and/or failed and what design modifications would be needed to succeed or to make it better for another drop.

Damage Assessment - While falling the center of gravity must have been off and the capsule started to spin very erratically. While falling it spun and decided to fall on the one weak spot that our capsule had this caused the impact time to be extremely short causing a large amount of force to be exerted on our egg... which shattered it. Instead of being protected by the two crumple zones it had no protection except for the jello, which didn't protect it very much. Our egg shattered and jello-y egg got all over my bear :( our egg man died.

Next Time - Next time there is an egg drop you need to have weights on the bottom which will cause it to call on the specific side you want it to fall on. By doing this you can protect that side the most (like we did) and you wont have to worry about it falling on any other side (which we didn't do). If we could do this again I would have put weights on the side with the two crumple zones which would have guaranteed success!

Measurements - 25cm long, 25cm wide, and 27cm tall, it also weighed 0.5kg.



We did not have an after picture because I thought we didn't need one if our egg broke, so I threw it all away.