So this weekend, I had the pleasure of spending most of my day helping out the Cubscouts with their space derby. It basically involved them making their own little planes out of balsa wood and parts from kit and flying them in races. However, through the chaos of little kids running around and adults cheering as if it were a UH football game, I realized that whoever won the race was simply a matter of physics. First was the example of the propulsion of the plane. It involved taking a bunch of large rubber bands and winding them about 40- 70 times. By cranking the drill gun thingy, the kinetic energy of motion was transferred into potential energy of the twisted rubber bands while the propeller was held. When the planes were released from the starting dock, the stored potential energy is released into the rotation of the blades of the propellers, changing potential energy into kinetic energy. The rotation of the blades also caught and pushed the air back behind it, causing the plain to move forward. However, i think a more accurate description is that the planes' propellers kind of carved or drilled their way through the air. Also I was interested in the electronic system of tracking first, second, third, and fourth places because it looked very similar to the photogates we used in class. As it turns out, it uses the same principle and was also able to measure the accuracy of how long it took the planes to fly from start to finish to the fourth decimal! I don't think any of the wings on the planes really did much considering they were very thin sheets of plastic that really didn't have any curve on them whatsoever. However, one boy for some reason glued his wings on and curved them so that they went up, kinda like an exponential growth graph. I think, though, it worked against him because this probably caused the wing to get pushed down, pushing the whole plane down, and creating unnecessary drag and resistance.
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