Activities

Lately, mainly on block days, we get lectures about different ideas or themes used in engineering. We have gone though moments, beam deflection, free body diagrams, electrical circuits, and centroids.
I have already talked about centroids in previous posts, so this will not be addressing those.
Moments, free body diagrams, and beam deflection go together. With free body diagrams, we are able to view the forces from different components and how they act upon an object, which relates to beam deflection, which incorporates the knowledge of where the weight is placed, the height off the ground, and the dimensions of the wood. That combines with moments, because moments is really saying the moment of inertia, which includes the dimensions of wood to discover it.
The electrical circuits activity was very difficult to accomplish because it required the use of electrical equipment which could be shot, burnt out, or just not working. Our main objective was to create an electrical circuit that would turn on a light bulb. After we accomplished that, we had to measure the voltage and resistance, then moved onto more intense circuit making.

SEA PEARCH

For a while now, every Monday and Friday, we have been working collaboratively with the NJROTC students in creating the SEA PEARCH submarine. I was placed in a group with Ralph, Wes, Jesse, and myself.
Our group finished relatively early and relaxed and tested the project out. In the end, we had created games that we voted for. The two that won were the sumo wrestling and capture the flag. Our group was in charge of the sumo wrestling ring and the ruled of the game.

Leadership 101/Dot game

On block day, our class broke up into teams of about 4 or 5 people, each of us electing our own team leader. Then we had a short lecture on leadership, direction, alignment, and commitment. After that we gathered around to demonstrate those traits through a dot game. We would stand in a large triangle, with people being dots, and we had to pass a tennis ball around while being given certain restraints. For example, we had to pass it to everyone, without anyone touching it one time, or not being able to pass it to anyone adjacent to you.

Centroids!

Centroid are the centers of masses, mostly used in construction of buildings through geometric shapes. Finding the centroid allows engineers to create a safer building, and a stronger one.
We had a worksheet, 2.1.1, and in the worksheet, we were asked to compute multiple centroids of usual geometric shapes, such as rectangles, circles, and triangles.
It was all pretty simple, until there were crazy shapes introduced, like a rectangle with negative space in forms of a semicircle, and a rectangle.
After that we had to create our own centroid both in reality and a virtual one on MDSolids.
MDSolids gives you a very accurate measurements that you enter into the program, as well as the exact placement of the centroid.
Pictures will be added

Cardboard Canoe Challenge!

I earned 15 Achievements on this challenge!
I worked with Wes, Israel, and Chase for this two week challenge. We worked diligently, smart, and safe. In the end, we had the best canoe in our class, winning almost every challenge.
Achievements:
Design Achievements
1. Design the problem and Brainstorm solutions
     The problem was that we had to build a boat using only cardboard and duct tape
      We needed our boat to be:

• strong
• sleek
• well floating
• water resistant
• high walls
• reinforced structure
• good wall joints
• double walled and floored
• maneuverable
• covered completely in duct tape\
• small enough that we don't need to do anything outside of class
• corners damage resistant and covered well
• ability to have a person in, completely dry
• ability to have two people in, completely dry
• balance
• large
• conserve duct tape
• fast
• easy to move, not too heavy
• colorful and artistic

2. Criteria and Constraints
     Our main criteria that we followed in this challenge was the boats ability to cross the pool
     Our main constraint in this challenge was to completely cover the boat in duct tape, well
3. Sketch Ideas

4. Prototype Ideas

5. Select an approach

6. Build It!

7. The Fastest

24.57 seconds is how long it took us to reach the other side, we smoked the other teams by at least 5 seconds, maybe more!

8. The Farthest

We traveled about 250 yards, which is 10 laps, and we could have gone farther, but we had to start the other challenges.

9. The Longest

We were the last team standing, we could have stayed up for at least a half of an hour, but we tested the boats limits and fit 460 pounds in it.

10. Balance Master

We had both Chase and Israel stand up in our boat

11. Videographer

If you want to see the video of our boat, go to Wes's blog at www.ipodman2001.blogspot.com for it. I would upload it here, but he has the iphone 5 and it will not allow me to post it on here from a PC.

12. Feedback

1. Strong floor really supported our weight well
2. The front and back walls were well duct taped and remained powerful, even after we had sunk
3. Our swimmer/pullers really moved quickly and dominated the other teams
4. The side walls were weak----We should have put on more layers of cardboard, and it would have held for a lot longer
5. Our vibrant colors really added to our design
6. We could have duct taped the boat better---ultimately was our slow demise, should have taken more times, maybe at a lunch, to duct tape it better
7. Our boat design was copied by other teams, but ours worked the best
8. We had a very hydrodynamic design for gliding through the water
9. We had a lighter person, Chase, to go in the boat at first, but it could even hold me
10. We mangled the original box design to create our own formation---We could have made a V-bottom

13. Redesign
    If we were to create another boat, we would most likely use the same design, except with making the walls more stable.

14. Make your own achievement
Our achievement was to have our boat hold over 450 pounds! I think we can call this achievement the "Heavy Loader". We had Wes, Israel and Chase in our boat at the same, and we could have fit more weight if we had enough room! I would approximate our total capacity around 500 pounds.
15. How low did you go?
     We went down only about a suprising 2-3 inches! The unit weight of water in pounds is 1.936 pounds/cubic foot. Chase weighed about 150 pounds. With the math that I did, I divided Chase's weight divided by the unit weight of water, and then divided that by 12, which would give us inches. The final answer is about 6.5 inches, which is pretty close to 3 inches, and it makes sense.

West Point Bridge Design

An opportunity to gain some more points to keep my grade up, I saw Mr. Olsen's post about building a West Point Bridge in our program on our computers. After a few different tries of making and adjusting multiple types of bridges, I developed a pretty well supported and stable bridge.

I attempted to keep the price down as much as I could which turned out to be pretty close to $400,000.

I learned a couple of engineering principles from this as well as physics.

After testing and retesting, I realized that the tension of both the compression and tension have to be under 1. I also discovered that the best way to support a bridge is from about with small, triangular piers that alleviate the compression and tension as you go to higher piers.

3rd Annual Mousetrap Racecar Challenge!

We developed, created, tested, reiterated, and retested our small, makeshift cars in this past week.
I was in a group with my classmate, Wes, and we built a sturdy but slow car, not winning any of the speed achievements, but we did win some other significant ones.
We also maintained the criteria and constraints listed under the challenge page on Mr. Olsen's blog.

All together, Wes and I managed to claim 12 achievements.



Our Race car

 


















Achievements:
Design Stage:
1. Brainiac

10 Concepts/Ideas:
*Lightweight
*Speed with Distance
*Small Wheels
*Small Body
*Wind Resistance
*Rubber Wheels
*Straight Shooter
*Strength
*Aerodynamic
*Small use of materials

2. Visualize It


Our first Sketch




















Build Stage:

3. Build It

4. The Price of Glory

The least we could do is $17 because we used

4 wheels, 3 holds, 1 mousetrap, 1 string, 4 Bars, 2 Axles, and 2 Blocks

Test Stage:

5. The Distance Event

6. Acceleration Event

7. Competitor

8. Feedback

+: It was sturdy, and it moved

Change: Could have used less materials to create our car

?: What would be a good way to change our car to make it faster/travel farther?

!: Make a more aerodynamic car, perhaps with shorter axles

9. Rework

10. Game Changer

*I think that adding a new rule that all axles have to be used. There was a constraint that we had to use two axles, but it did not say that we had to make use of them. My new rule would be to make both of the axles on the ground, and not like an axle on the ground then one just hanging in the air.

11. Name it

*I would change the Led Foot Challenge name to "If you're not first, you're last".

12. Leave it cleaner than you found it

*Wes and I dissasembled out cars completely, even if we found some of the parts already assembled, we also kept any trash off of our desk and placed it in the trash can.