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4mo
When I did the egg drop project we were all given the same 3 or 4 sheets of paper, some string, and tape, so weight was not really a factor or measured. I assume that for your project you were given more leeway in materials?
I remember doing this project, and a bunch of people had a bunch of cool ideas trying to closely wrap the egg, or build a structure that could support it.
We just wrapped the egg in some wrinkled up paper, and ours was the only one to survive.
In my high school statistics class, one day we were making paper airplanes and we'd throw them down the hall to record their distance and figure out the mean/median/mode and all that. I didnt know how to make a paper airplane, so I just crimpled up a ball of paper and threw it. Got 3rd furthest out of about 25 kids
When we did it everyone was using one of their sheets of paper and string to make a parachute, and the rest to make a box to hold the egg.
I decided to double the size of the parachute to two sheets of paper and just rolled the 3rd sheet into a cone shape. The 4th sheet I crumpled to hold and cushion the egg at the top of the cone, while the bottom of the cone acted as a "crumple zone" to absorb the impact.
Mine was one of I think two to survive when we dropped it off a bridge near school.
Ironic that being light was weighted so heavily.
In some intro to engineering courses, they really drive home fitting the solution to the requirements. If egg survival was a desired outcome but not an actual requirement, then the weighing of factors might have been geared toward a counterintuitive solution on purpose. To emphasize that point, solution has to fit the requirements, not what you think the requirements are.
theres nothing in the NEC codebook that says it has to work
WHOOOSH
Yeah seriously, I need more coffee.
While your insight is indeed interesting, they were making a dumb pun, lol
Oh wow, I can’t believe I missed that. Well done!
Damn it, I thought I was making a smart pun 😞
I remember a buddy of mine used a container of mayo. The egg survived, which surprised most of the class...
That's genius
Helium will not help lighten the weight of a steel container at all tho
Edit: Apparently a lot of ppl in the comments live with cartoon physics
It won't decrease the mass, but it'll definitely decrease the weight, as weight is technically the force exerted on the object by gravity.
Even helium baloons barely be able to lift a pencil when attached. But technically yes, it will decrease it by few grams
Just put more helium in
If you put more helium in the same volume, it becomes denser, and therefore heavier.
Use low fat helium with less atoms per 100 grams.
The Slimdenburg.
Bruh I'm dying over here lol
If that happens then you just put more helium in it.
But if you add compressed helium (by a factor of 100 for example), lifting force will add up…. right?
/s
Yes. You must be very careful as it will shoot up into the sky at incredibly acceleration.
RIP to flight 420, a cautionary tale in the pursuit of Troll Physics. The tube shot straight up through the cockpit and killed the pilot, then ricocheted and knocked the other out, who fell onto the yoke and caused the plane to go into a nosedive. 😔🪦
You can’t decrease the weight of an object without reducing its mass (assuming the gravitational force is constant). Adding helium to the structure decreases its mass because you don’t really add it, you replace air with it. And helium is lighter than air.
making it a vacuum would have been better
It's much much easier to keep helium inside a container than to depressurize inside a container
No, weight does not equal mass. Weight is typically referred to the force an object incurs on another object when at rest. It typically is M*g where M is mass and g is the gravitational constant. However, in a system where there is a buoyancy force opposite to gravity, this would effectively decrease the weight of the system.
I never said mass = weight. I said you can’t decrease weight without decreasing mass. Which is true is the gravitational force is constant.
He decreased mass by replacing the air in the container with helium, which is less dense than air. Therefore the mass overall decreased, although it would be a negligible amount.
You can decrease weight without decreasing mass. Just go to the moon!
You can't technically decrease the weight but you can exert an upwards force on the object due to buoyancy of helium compared to air which decreases its net downward force due to gravity.
Helium under pressure is still going to weigh more than air at atmospheric pressure. Helium tanks literally weigh more when they are full of helium versus empty.
Density goes up with pressure, balloons work because the helium can take up a large volume and stay at a relatively low pressure.
Eh, it's probably half because you're "um acktually"ing this sweet dad story, and half because you're not technically correct.
Replacing air with helium will make something that normally has air in it weigh a little less. Helium weighs almost nothing (about 166 grams per cubic meter, while the same volume of air is about 1.2kg), so replacing air with helium technically reduces the weight of something.
The key is, unless the object is enormous, the difference is negligible. Air weighs very little in comparison to the steel and other construction elements in the first place, so replacing it with even lighter gas does little for the overall weight. It's like if you're trying to cut down your monthly spending budget, and you've found a place that sells very, very cheap paperclips. Unless paperclips were a major part of your budget in the first place, even if they're virtually free, it's not going to have much of an effect on your overall spending.
There definitely seem to be some people who view helium as some kind of magic weightlessness-juice as opposed to a light gas.
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4mo
Giant gas bags attached to a metal frame, not a metal container filled with gas. And the Hindenburg was hydrogen.
The greentext says it was a metal tube frame with a wrapping that held the gas, not a metal box
A ship floats, why does my solid steel cube still sink then
ITT: people grappling with the concept of gravity and buoyancy
I lost a few IQ points reading that. All you're doing, at best, is subtracting the weight of the air inside the tubes. Just assume that the air weighs "one" and the helium weighs "zero". The difference is abysmal.
Bro are you seriously tryinf to argue against buoyancy? This is literally how blimps work, just scaled down.
to be clear, nobody is "arguing against buoyancy." I think they're saying the buoyancy would be negligible at that size.
The principle is what matters though. Its a classroom setting, we're trying to teach and learn. Literally just scale it up and you have a blimp.
The principle is not what matters. Buoyancy is a principle, but lead sinks and wood floats. Aluminum also sinks, but you can build a floating aluminum boat. The parameters surrounding a design on which the principle of buoyancy acts is what matters.
You can literally make a lead zeppelin. Mythbusters covered it.
They could barely get the balloon to float much less make a Zeppelin from it
Nice job moving thr goalposts, dickwad.
matters how? this is a reddit thread.
i'm neither sure what you're arguing, nor what happens if you win
Expectation are higher than “I got baked and had an idea, just imagine this in a way that actually proves the point” in university engineering classes.
He got an A though.
Did you even read the post? They aren't making theoretical shit, they are making real constructs with the goal of making said construct as strong and as light as possible.
No the assigningmemt was design a structure as strong and light as possible. A piece of wood is likely a better measure of that if you assume 50/50 grade weighting for strength and weight each.
Unless this project is made out of aluminum foil or literally shaped like a blimp that helium isn’t gonna make a noticeable difference
Bro thr shape doesnt matter, we're not trying to sail this thing.
not the shape, the volume, unless whatever he build used a tiny amount of steel containing a huge volume of air to be displaced by the helium the effect would be negligible
Yeah, obviously you have to scale it up, but its a fucking class project. You turn it in and say "to scale" voila
Right but if you scaled up the tube with helium you wouldn't suddenly get a blimp you'd have an extremely heavy steel tube with very thick walls. Which is at its core very much so not like a blimp. It's very much so not conforming to the spirit of buoyancy.
You absolutely just cannot scale up steel and keep weight down
my guy, engineering classes aren't a middle school science fair, you aren't filling out a diorama after skimming a wikipedia page and calling it a day. you aren't filling a tube with helium and saying "this but bigger" and getting a passing grade.
people have this weird idea from TV and movies that being a good engineer is ignoring the project parameters and trying to outsmart the people around you. that shit doesn't work and people will not put up with you in school or in the industry
…it absolutely does matter lmao. The reason blimps are big balloons is because it creates a lot of volume for gas, surrounded by (relatively) small amounts of material holding it in. Why do you think there are no small blimps? Because the ratio between gas and weight needs to be enormous
Bro youre talking about size not shape. This is like kindergarten shit
Bro you know what I meant lol gimme a break
Except it's that much scaled down that the principle becomes useless compared to the weight of the steel or aluminum pipe.
You'd have better results sucking the inside of the tubes vacuum.
That's how stupid this is.
You'd make a horrific teacher.
He's right though
Sure, but we're talking about a class project. A teach could easily say: "scale this up and it'll float" rather than "this made me stupider even though it works in principle and reality."
You couldn't scale up the tubes full of helium and have them be that much lighter though. Even if you had a giant steel tube filled with helium it would be a negligible difference in weight. You lose about 1 gram per liter by replacing air with helium. If you had a steel tube that had an interior volume of 10k liters you'd lose a whopping 10kilos. When talking about a steel tube that holds 10k liters that is essentially a zero kilogram difference.
A blimp isn't made of steel. It's basically a giant fucking balloon holding up a much smaller pod underneath it.
If you scale it up 1 to 1 it won't float. You need to drastically reduce the wall thickness to basically make a steel foil balloon. Which won't bear any substantial load.
If you want to make something very light that can support a lot of load you need to rely on the materials strength, not on buoyancy. A blimp can barely lift itself, a steel structure can support thousands of times its own weight.
You'd make a horrific scientist.
???
just to clarify, the OP never claimed anywhere that they were trying to be a teacher
No, it really wouldn't. Using steel pipes? Why even bother with the helium? Why not just evacuate all the gas from the pipes and seal it off?
"Just scaled down" is like, the whole problem. They literally are arguing it won a science fair with how little it weighed. It didn't change the weight at all.
Where the fuck did they say that?
You trolling‽
The force of buoyancy remains the same before and after, since the volume doesn't change, what changes is the mass.
OPs dad would have done even better if he had pulled a vacuum, but yeah, the mass of the air inside a steel tube compared to its mass is negligible.
Are blimps made out of entirely steel??
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4mo
You need around times the helium than the weight for it to weigh "nothing". It says steel tubes. If it's 100g you need close to a kg of helium. Just as an example. Look up 1kg of helium how big the container is. There is a reason why blimps are absolutely fucking massive.
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4mo
"have to design a small structure"
Honestly? You fell for the 4chin Greentext story. It's ok
how much buoyancy do you honestly think the amount of helium that could fit in a small steel tube could provide?
That’s not how losing IQ points works
We're talking under pressure too, helium tanks weigh more when they are full, and that's all he really made.
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4mo
dad lives on in your memories anon, dont forget that
Comment copied from:
r/wholesomegreentext/comments/pg3zsw/anon_tells_a_story_about_his_dad/hb9flc2/
OP dad secretly just an engineering genius but covers it up with bullshit stories like that 😂
It takes about an entire liter of helium to offset the weight of a single gram of steel.
Bro wasted money on helium.
It was a lot cheaper back in the day.
In middles school we had to build a raft that would float and hold 50 pennies. Pass or fail.
I was washing a coke can out to recycle and I fropped it in thw dishwater and it landed perfectly upright floating on the surface.
I used a can opener and cut off the top of a coke can and brought it in. Set it on the surface of the water and no matter how much pennies she put in it it couldn't sink until 100% of it was under water. More pennies just meant more submerged than before, but still floating.
This is a karma bot, it’s existed for years and activated within the last couple days to repost.
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My dad used to tell me a story about a college philosophy class. The professor had a writing assignment where the only prompt was “Why?”. While other students started writing about the meaning of life, Categorical Imperatives, etc…my dad thought long and hard, wrote “why not?” on his paper, turned it in, walked out. Got an A.
He also told me about some art history class, where they were studying a painting where the artist had died before completing it. The assignment was to argue how the artist was planning on completing the painting. My dad said his argument was that if the artist had known that people would be discussing this painting hundreds of years in the future because of this, he would have left it unfinished.
Are these stories true? Who knows. But they’re good stories and I miss my dad. Thanks OP.
Fake and gay
i read it as the OOP was implying his dad “technically cheated” by sneaking in the Helium without the teacher noticing, thus outsmarting everyone?
the fact that the structure was trying to “float” (thus making it a bit lighter) due to the Helium was supposed to be hidden from the teacher, no?
whether or not the teacher knew there was Helium included kinda matters.
None of it matters, because it's 4chan, and everything there is just "artistic works of fiction and falsehood". Helium barely offsets the weight of a thin latex balloon. No way it's going to make any noticeable difference to a steel pipe. Neither will hydrogen or a vacuum.
The steel would have to be so thin, that it wouldn't be strong anyways. You'd be able to crumple the foil tube.
So ignoring the mass/weight confusion. A liter of helium can lift about a gram. For the Americans, that's a small ass amount of mass. So you'd need a big fucking container to reduce the measured mass significantly.
My dad had a similar story about a bridge building project. He brought a block of wood and won. Unverified.