by divbzero on 5/29/2025, 5:35:38 PM
by plasma_beam on 5/29/2025, 7:05:40 PM
In high school physics I procrastinated until the night before our egg drop competition to finally address what I was going to do. I got a medium/large size plastic tupperware container (rigid plastic body with a rigid lid). I took a bag of cotton balls, stuffed them in there as tight as I could, put an empty cardboard toilet paper roll vertically in the center, with more cotton balls designed to go in said cardboard below and above the egg. Taped the lid shut. People laughed at my concoction, especially those that went to great efforts to design theirs. I even tossed mine in the air beforehand to test it, which gave me extreme confidence going into the 30 ft drop that I'd be fine. I was. I do not recall what side it landed on but obviously it bounced several hard times after hitting the ground.
by Apes on 5/29/2025, 5:13:30 PM
> They dropped 60 eggs each from three different heights (8, 9, and 10 millimeters)
Based on the photos, they measured this as the distance from the surface of the edge to the surface they were dropping it onto.
But for the vertical egg drop, the center of mass is several millimeters higher than for the horizontal drop, a pretty significant difference when you're only dropping 10mm at the most.
Maybe I'm missing something, but based on how they set up the experiment, maybe they're not measuring how resistant the egg is in certain positions, but instead just measuring that higher potential energy is more likely to break an egg?
by hinkley on 5/29/2025, 7:19:05 PM
From an engineering standpoint it ‘makes sense’ to make the device radially symmetrical by standing the egg on one end. But it sounds like that causes the device to need to be better to achieve the same level of protection.
by tiffanyh on 5/29/2025, 8:30:57 PM
Isn't this simply due to the fact that there's more surface area contact when an egg is on it's side vs vertically.
by vlovich123 on 5/29/2025, 9:15:35 PM
I thought the key was to completely surround it with water & make sure it's not floating next to any side of the container to avoid incidental contact.
> They dropped 60 eggs each from three different heights (8, 9, and 10 millimeters) onto a hard surface in three different orientations: horizontal, vertical on the sharp end, and vertical on the blunt end.
I find it hard to extrapolate from this experimental setup to an egg drop competition. A ~1cm drop onto a hard surface is quite different from a ~10m drop in protective packaging.