Saturday, November 7, 2015

Second Episode of Week 3 Avtivity


Hi, this is Group 8. Welcome to our blog! :D  Today's blog is the ' second episode ' of Week 3 activity.

Our first doing for Activity 3 was not going very well and pretty much a mess. The boat that we made cannot balance properly with the loads on the water. This is because we misunderstood the volume needed for the boat and we mistakenly included platform to our actual volume of the boat that we calculated. Hence, my handsome teammate, Weng Siong and I decided to remake our boat during our free time on Wednesday.

To add on, the actual reason why our boat cannot balance well on water can be simply summarised with the picture below :

Our previous combat boat has a higher centre of gravity than centre of buoyancy,causing it to be unstable.The weight of the boat and loads together act downward through the centre of gravity. The corresponding buoyant force acts upward through the centre of buoyancy.With the addition of loads, our boat will tilt one side downward and make our boat overturn.
Therefore, we designed our new boat in a shape of teardrop. Why is streamlined body our choice? It is because it has the least drag coefficients when encountering fluid flow.

This is our calculation to find out volume needed to make our boat. Making use of formula of density, we found out the volume needed for our boat.We have spared 16 % extra for our boat in order to make it function smoothly.

The materials that we used remained the same, which are styrofoam, stick, UHU glue and wires. Just that we changed our loads from bottles to two cans of 100 plus as 100 plus can be controlled easier.



After several attempts, we successfully built it out. Its balance on water is good and it worked perfectly well!  We started taking new readings and recorded them down for our assignment. 


Never Give Up! This is what I have learnt throughout Activity 3. Although it is tiring and time-consuming, the desired outcome that we achieved is indeed worth the effort. Once again, thank you for reading this :D

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