Mechanical Engineering student Gus Hernandez examines an "egg basket" equipped with a camera designed to capture the image of an egg breaking.
Don't put all your eggs in one basket, especially when the basket has to sail down a zip line from the second story of the Nguyen Building Atrium.
As a finale to Engineers Week activities, Volgenau students participated in a classic physics activity with a twist, or rather a line. The classic challenge, drop a raw egg from a height and make sure it doesn't crack. This time planners added a zip line.
Adding the zip line to the egg drop forced students to design a holder strong enough to withstand impact, and reliably stay on the line. The added design element meant the future engineers needed to consider, among other things, how the weight is placed on the holder.
Students also explored gravity, the force of impact, and how to work directly against those forces, while use their engineering skills to design and prototype their devices. And the best part¬¬—even if the egg cracks, it's so much fun, no one minds.
Competition winner, Gustavo (Gus) Hernandez said, "I did it just for fun, I didn't know I was going to win."
The winning entry began with two compartments that worked as a piston system. "The inner container was free to slide into the outer container," said Hernandez. "The outer container received the impact as the inner container slid towards the front."
Hernandez then added an airbag with a relief hole just in case the impact was too strong. If the second system failed, the container had a third system (a spring mounted to the egg holder) designed to absorb whatever shock was left in from the impact. The fourth and final system was the casing that surrounded the egg. A system of straws allowed the egg to move up and down when it was under shock.
"Redundant safety systems are usually the best," said Hernandez. "If one fails the next will usually work—in this case the case went sideways right before hitting the board at the bottom of the zip line. If I had put all of my egg in one basket it would have been scrambled for sure."