Wednesday, April 13, 2011

How to build my very own World Trade Center/CN tower out of newspaper...



Given another peculiar task of building the tallest tower out of 3 sheets of news paper and a desk width wide worth of tape, we (our roller coaster groups) had to devise a plan. the easiest way to build the tallest structure, by far, is just to roll the news paper by the length, and then attach them one by one to the ends. However, this made the structure very unbalanced. Therefore, the structure, had to be BALANCED (meaning it would have to stay up) and be tall. Our group first analyzed the cn tower. The cn tower is very similar to a cone shape, wide a the bottom , and it generally get thiner at the top. Also, note that the antenna at the end of the cn tower... is very "cheap" when you measure a building by height. But in this world, anything goes.
We knew that any extra tape we had, would contribute to the heigh by making it stand tall above our structure.
We based our structure on the lesson we had learned in class. Center of gravity must be closer to the ground in order to help balanced the building. Take the world trade center for example. It may look like it is uniform width all the way up to the top, however that is an incorrect notion. in fact, the density, and the weight of the steel was much heavier on the bottom of the building than at the top of the building.
Also in order to prevent as much swaying in the world trade center, they had to add supports.
therefore, i think it is safe to say that, making a wide base at the bottom is very essential. As well, i believe that when we do try to make the height component of the structure, we have to make it strong, or it cannot be to thin and flimsy.

lets hope everything works out!!!




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