Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Aero dynamics

Intro to Project
The purpose of this project was to make a wooden CO2 powered car that can go 20 meters in the shortest time. The car had to be less than 12 inches long.

Tech concepts
In this project we dealt with tech concepts such as dynamic pressure, drag, lift, and thrust. The lower the drag and lift the faster the car moved. The thrust was provided by the CO2 car and was held uniform

Learning goals
The main learning goal of this project was to do independent research and think out the design of our cars before we started.

The car
Our CO2 car was cut from a piece of 2x4. We based the design off of race cars, making it angled and smooth with enough weight in the back. Our first attempt broke as we were drilling the final hole for the CO2 cartridge, and so we had to quickly make a 2nd one. The second didn't turn out quite as well, but still performed nicely. However, during our 2nd race one of the hooks came off of the line so it spun out.

Positive feedback
I liked this project, although not as much as the first. I feel as if too much time was spent on the first project which didn't give us enough time on this project. There wasn't really a way to test much until the final racing by when it's too late

Redesign
If we were to redo this project, we would make our car much lighter. In the class competition, it was the lightest and not necessarily most aerodynamic cars that performed the best. The weight could be taken off in width as well as height

Tech Resources
In this project we used these tech resource
  • Tools
  • Machines
  • People
  • Energy
  • Time
  •  Information

Biggest challenges
The biggest challenge of this project was trying to quickly make our car after shattering the first one, we only had two days to make the second.

What was learned
Me and my partner learned learned this project how to think through our design before working, and having to have more precision than in previous projects.

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