During the class, our teacher told us to form into groups to try out this propulsion game about how to create more thrust to the ping-pong ball. We are being asked to make the ping-pong ball fly as high as possible by using the given materials to us such as, scissors, tape, balloon, ping-pong ball and A4 papers.
Firstly, I started to blow the balloon and my group mates roll the A4 size paper to a cylinder shape. And we tape the mouth of the balloon to the bottom of the paper cylinder. After that I let go of my hand and let the air in the balloon out. At first the ping-pong ball did not go any higher. It just stops at the top of the cylinder.
After much thoughts and discussion with my group members, we decided to cut the A4 size paper to a smaller piece, since we want the air to touch the ping-pong ball as soon as possible. And the shorter the paper is, lesser friction will cause between the air and the paper.
After cutting the paper to smaller piece, we rolled it to become a shorter cylinder. And we did the same thing by taping the mouth of the balloon to the bottom of the cylinder. And we placed the ping-pong ball at the top and thus I let go of the mouth of the balloon to allow the air in the balloon to pass through it.
But other than we changed the length of the cylinder, we also press the balloon in order to make the air in the balloon to flow out faster so as to create more thrust. In the end, we succeeded by making the ping-pong ball fly up.
Through this game, I’ve learnt that the shape and size of the cylinder can actually determine the friction of air. Therefore, the shorter the cylinder is, the air will have more pushes to the ping-pong ball. Thus it creates more thrust.
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