Balloon Car Project

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The task that my partner, Matthew Coughlin, and I, Ellie Zinno, were given in this project was to design a balloon-powered cart that could travel at least three meters in five seconds or less. The only materials that we were given to build the cart were one index card (measuring 7.6 centimeters x 12.7 centimeters in area), one bamboo skewer (measuring 24.0 centimeters in length), one balloon, one drinking straw (measuring 19.6 centimeters in length and 0.6 centimeters in diameter), Scotch tape, and bottle caps (supplied by my partner and I). We started by designing a rough sketch of how we wanted the cart to look. We planned to cut the bamboo skewer in half and tape both pieces to the underside of the index card, letting some hang off the …show more content…
Had we poked the holes in the bottle caps big enough so that they could move freely on the axles, the holes would be too big and the wheels would flop around, affecting the motion of the cart. Luckily, we realized our mistake before we built the cart. Had we not, we might have irreversibly disfigured the bottle caps. We realized that we would have to find a way for the skewers to move with the bottle caps. Suddenly, I had a moment of realization. If we taped pieces of straw to the underside of the index card, we could thread the skewers through and allow them to turn like that, reducing friction in the process! This ultimately ended up becoming the basis for our design, even though we kept modifying it as we went …show more content…
According to Newton’s second law of motion, objects with more mass accelerate more slowly than those with less mass. Since we had already proven that we could do what was asked of us, we wanted to try to go above and beyond and set a new record for either the farthest distance or the fastest time. To be able to do either of those things, we needed to either cut down on the mass or increase the force. Well, we had already blown our balloon up as far as it could go without popping, so that left only the mass. By the time we finished making modifications to our design, we were actually able to reduce the mass by about two grams! While that may not seem like a lot, two grams was actually about 15% of the cart’s original mass. Upon further testing, shaving off all of that excess material allowed our cart to accelerate much faster, giving us better results
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