How much force can an egg withstand?

Plan: Put weights on the egg until it breaks

It took us 250 grams (0.25 kilograms) to break the egg. The total force that broke the egg was 2.45 newtons. This number is wrong because there was an error when the mass hit the egg. This mass hit the egg with the corner which caused the egg to crack. What we did was average the two numbers that are other classmates got, they got 13.9N and 15.6N which gave us 14.8N.

The car hits the ramp with 62 newtons and the goal is to put the egg on the cart and let it go down the ramp without cracking. To achieve this we need to reduce the velocity or time when cart reaches the bottom. To reduce time or velocity what we decided to try was add friction to the cart so this way the velocity would be reduced.

Next we started planning the cart.

This is our cart

First we want to increase time

To do this we reduce the force for this we want to use a balloon, this will have same effect as the airbag, and this will cause the impact to last longer.

a few materials we thought of were:

Pompons- to work as a cushion for the egg

Ballon- to cause same effect as an airbag in a car; for the impact

Play dough- to protect the egg from the impact

Small plastic cup- we put the egg inside the cup with the pompons; the cup works as a shell or house to protect the egg.

Tape- we used tape to adjust the plastic cup onto the car, that way it holds on to something and does not fall over.

Popsicles- we used popsicles to prevent the egg to come out of the cup (incase it falls, the popsicles holds the egg inside, keeping it from falling over.

Our Final Product (cart)

Behind the scenes

At the end, we found out that the maximum velocity of our cart was 32.08m/s, and our impulse was 0.74N. We found out that the time it tok the cart to stop was 0.02 seconds. Our egg did not break or crack.

Estimates:

The cart will probably hit the wall with 25-30m/s.

The change of momentum of the cart will be zero, because the initial momentum is zero (it's not moving) and so is the final one (because it is not moving).

The impulse of the hit should be around 60N.

The cart will hit the wall with both mass and velocity combined.

The impact will last around 0.5 seconds