8/10/2019 Egg Drop Essay

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Jacob Shaw

Professor Muesing

English 2116

August 24, 2014

Egg Drop Article (Engineer)

On August 14, 2014 we completed a successful egg drop. We were given the

difficult task of dropping an egg from a two story balcony and building a container that

prevents any damage to the egg itself. The egg container could only include poster board

and masking tape in its design. As a successful team of engineers, we had been tasked

many times with difficult challenges. With the task and challenges in mind we began

planning our egg container.

In order to build a successful egg contraption we took into account variables that

would be out of our control. Our focus when planning our project was primarily on wind

and gravity. Gravity would pull our egg down at a speed of 9.8 meters per second, a

speed that would have to be calculated into our final container. Whatever we built had to

withstand the force of gravity on impact. With gravity in mind, we began planning the

containers design and geometric configuration. At first we considered a box. Boxes offer

stability and strength when it comes to stacking, but are inefficient when it comes to

drops. The corners on boxes create weak points that might lead to a breakdown of our

egg container. After further research we decided on a cylindrical design. Cylinders, like

boxes, offer stability with stacking but did not have a specific weak spot. While boxes

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lacked strength on its corners, cylinders did not have corners. Cylinders we found

distributed impact and weight more evenly than any other geometric design. We cut out a

rectangular piece of poster board, rolled it into a cylinder and taped our container with

masking tape. When creating the cylinder we made sure that the cylinder was wide

enough to allow two inches on all sides of the egg once placed in the container. With the

successful construction of our cylinder container, we began planning a system to absorb

the impact on the egg when our container hit the cement floor. After much research, we

found cushion (air) absorbed impact well and could be implemented into our container

design. We tossed around ideas to cushion our egg on impact and came to the conclusion

that balled up masking tape would work best for supporting the egg and absorbing

impact. We balled up the tape and placed it completely around our egg before placing it

into the cylinder. After completely covering the egg we placed our egg carefully into the

cylinder container. With our egg nestled into our cylinder container we came up with a

parachute system to slow decent and provide stability, should wind become a factor in

our egg drop. We decided that drag would be beneficial in slowing our egg down after

dropping from the second story balcony. We used our remaining poster board, a

rectangle, as the parachute and attached it using masking tape. After further discussion

we created an outer layer of balled up tape to absorb even more force on impact. See

figure 1.1 for a visual depiction of our finished product.

Our egg container was dropped Thursday August 21, 2014 and successfully

protected the egg from any damage. Our container was determined to have adequate

support to protect an egg from breaking at heights up to two stories.

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Figure 1.1