Final Design Project The final design was a combination of a month’s worth of creativity, ingenuity, hard work and most importantly, team work. Although the preliminary design was determined to be mostly unusable, we did gain a vast amount of knowledge which was critical to the final design of our project. The first portion of the project was tasked with catching all of the marbles as they were going to be dropped all at once. Our goal was to create a mechanism which would all for the balls to be sent through the project one by one as we believed that this would allow for more efficient and more accurate sorting. Thankfully, we were able to use the same design for the ball delivery system as in the preliminary design as the entire team was very pleased with how well it worked. The final design for the mechanism was built on a cardboard shoe box which was flipped …show more content…
As acceleration in the case is not dependant on mass the balls gum and wood balls should theoretically have the exact same final velocity when they roll over the rubber bands. This allows for the only impact to be the force of gravity on the balls, Fg=mgSinθ. As the force of gravity is dependant on the mass of the balls, the higher mass of the gum balls should cause a higher force pushing the ball down through the rubber bands and therefore should cause the heavier gum balls to fall through. The goal was to get an angle high enough that the acceleration would be enough for the wood balls to roll all the way across the rubber bands and not get stuck on the rubber band track as this would cause all of the following balls to fall through, even if they were wood. Aside from this, the inclination angle of the ramp did not have a very large effect on the efficiency of the sorting