Primary And Secondary Impact In A Car Crash

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There are many forces that play into an object falling down and hitting the ground. For a fragile object like an egg, making it survive a small fall is very difficult let alone four stories. It is possible to make the egg survive however, by encasing it in something. You can compare the egg to a human in a car. A car crash can be deadly however the car that is around acts like the objects you would encase an egg in. In a car crash, or in most collisions, there is a primary and a secondary impact. The primary impact in a car crash would be the car deforming and being destroyed due crashing into something. The secondary impact is the contents in the car moving, in this case, quite violently. In many cases, the secondary impact might actually be more deadly than the primary, and the same goes for an egg drop, because there are contents inside the …show more content…

Modern cars are created with crumple zones, areas of a car that are made to break when the car crashes into something. If you recall from the first paragraph about primary and secondary collisions, crumple zones can minimize the effect of primary collisions by taking the force and putting it into destroying the outside. We tried to mimic this with our design. Styrofoam is a very light but it is also very easy to break, and flipping the bottom plate upside allowed for the plate on the bottom to most likely break when it hits the ground. But, like in a car, the plate might be broken but the contents inside the cup are safe. One last time we have done to slow the fall was to add a balloon to the top of the design. Trapping air particles that constantly want to go up adds to the air resistance, making the design slow down even more in midair. With all these additions, after testing several times, the egg survived all of them. Yet when we tested the final time of four stories, the egg in its plastic bag disappeared never to be found

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