Team 9 5
Dale Sharpe
Daniel Stoltz
Richard Wheeler
Andrew Eastes
Design and Build a Roller Coaster
This project was designed to show how the laws of physics and the lessons from EF 151 could be applied to the construction of a roller coaster. The universal directions for the construction of the roller coaster only specified the size limits and the desired run time. The design was intended to maximize the use of the gravitational force and to eliminate the use for outside work to be put into the system. The roller coaster involves a series of ramps, leading down a slope. Then the ball drops from the slope into a loop and around a final spiral to the finish. The roller coaster was constructed using various, nonexpensive materials purchased from a craft store. Following construction, testing proceeded to ensure that the design allowed the steel ball to travel from start to finish in the allotted time. The designed roller coaster accomplished all tasks at hand, and helped to visually show the laws of physics.
The purpose of the final team project was to participate in a group to construct a small-scale roller coaster that incorporates the lessons that have been taught in EF 151 this semester. The main function of the roller coaster was to transport an object from a starting point to the end in a specified time. The specified time in this case was as close to fifteen seconds as possible. The roller coaster also had to be within the size limit of a .5-meter square box. The devise was, however, permitted to be folded, or collapsed, in order to fit into the size limitations. If teams chose to have a collapsible roller coaster, it must be constructed to be fully functional within thirty seconds. The object traveling through the constructed roller coaster was allowed to be initially started by hand, but once the object was in motion it could not be tampered with in any way. The devise constructed required calculations in order to show that the roller coaster would exhibit the laws of physics. The calculations also had to prove that the object in consideration would complete the roller coaster, start to finish, in approximately fifteen seconds.
With all of the requirements in mind, the roller coaster design began to come into shape. The primary concern in developing a design was to allow the gravitational force to perform the majority of the work during the motion of the object. In allowing the gravitational force to act on the object, there would be little to no work required to put into the system through devises such as springs, pulleys, or gears. The initial process of the design involved incorporating a loop somewhere in the construction. This loop was eventually proceeded by a spiral, but the design wasn’t anywhere near the allotted time frame. To add a significant amount time to the initial design, a series of diagonal ramps were added to a sloped board. The calculations for these additions were fairly simple because they only involved the potential energy of the object based on the height differentials between each ramps placed on the board. From the conservation of energy equation, the initial and final velocities could be calculated. The discovery of these velocities allowed for the calculation of the time that had elapsed after each ramp. These simple calculations allowed for the determination of how many ramps of specified length and angle to add to the board. The calculations for the second half of the roller coaster were primarily involving circular motion because of the loop on the down slope and the horizontal spiral to end the motion. The normal accelerations were calculated, and from the radius the velocities before and after the loop can be determined. From the velocities, again, the time can be calculated and predict whether the object would be on track for completion in the given fifteen seconds.
The total construction involved purchasing several dowel rods, foam poster boards, and cardboard poster boards. A group member previously owned the steel ball, used as the object. All expenses totaled to the rough figure of fifteen dollars. The dowel rods were used as support to construct a topless cube. The foam poster board acted as the slope at the beginning of the coaster, to which the ramps were attached. These ramps, the loop, and the spiral were all constructed from the cardboard poster board. The most time consuming portions of the project were the design process and the testing. The design process took several meetings to come to a consensus. Several designs were scrapped because they required a significant amount of work to be created and put into the system. The creation of this work brought about many calculation errors, leading us to discard those designs and simply use the gift of gravity. Once the design had been finalized, the roller coaster was constructed. The construction didn’t take very long because the calculations had narrowed the amount of error that human hands could create. The testing process afterwards proved somewhat time consuming because several tweaks to the construction to make the timing closer to fifteen seconds. Once the construction and testing were completed, the roller coaster operated nearly exactly how it had been designed to function.
Deciding what to do for the project revolved solely around accomplishing the time goal and having it work every time. To accomplish the time goal we needed something to slow down the speed of our rollercoaster. The answer to this was creating distance at a small decline. This is where the zigzag pattern came from. Having it zigzag created the distance need and the low degree of the angle created the time we need and the high percentage of working. Using gravity to propel the coaster assured that it would work every time. After creating the zigzag portion of our track we learned that it took seventeen seconds to go through so everything after the zigzag did not matter how long it took just if it worked.
The Device:
Conclusion:
In conclusion, the construction of the roller coaster came about through several meetings by the team members. Roughly, the total time it took to create and build the coaster was about 7 hours. Most of this time was spent in the creating process and figuring out the mathematics to run the coaster for +15 seconds. Most of the problems were encountered in constructing the roller coaster was matching the calculations and drawings we developed. The presentation and report were also developed during the team meetings.
References:
The reference and we used are as follows:
Fishbane, Paul M., Gasiorowicz, Stephen G., & Thornton, Stephen T. (2005). Physics: for scientists and
engineers. 3rd ed. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Ef 151 Lecture notes: Chapters 4-6.
Our textbook and lecture notes we used as means to figure out the math equations and the concepts we used to build and create a functioning roller coaster.