The forum in CBL went extremely well, we presented multiple times, and our audience seemed to enjoy it. We were presenting about our solution, and we had our poster, and two prototypes to shops people. The two prototypes were our crates that we would drop supplies in. We showed how they would open, and how their hinges worked. I learned that it is more up to me to interact, and I started doing that at the end. I had been noticing that people would come up and read the poster, but didn’t want to interact, so we would have to. Our poster was printed on a large poster board, and we organized it well. I found it very useful, because when I was at a loss of things to say, I could refer to the graphs featured on it, or read from it. I thought the poster was very valuable. To prepare for the forum, I studied all of the documents that we had used throughout CBL. I read over them, and I made sure that I knew what they meant. I had done a lot of research, and I had familiarized myself with low velocity air drops, and I found that helpful, so that you can give deeper background to your presentation. Overall, I thought my group did really well, and that the forum was a success. I enjoyed it, and I look foreword to doing things like it in the future.
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We have built a scaled prototype, and we tested it with a simulated weight. After making brief calculations, we deemed that it could bare appropriate weight to be dropped, and it was durable enough to work. We took measurements of its air speed, and it was falling at appropriate speed, so when the parachute opened, it slowed to a speed that would be correct in a real drop situation. We are planning to present it at the forum, and we will partner with companies to implement it into real world drops. Our final prototype, built by Wyatt, was designed out of wood, and shaped like the real drops would. It had the same mechanism that the real drops would, and it was a highly accurate design. After our tests, we inputted the speeds and measurements into a graph, and we will use those graphs on our poster. We tested air speed, wind speed, and velocity of the parachute opening. We put those graphs into our forum presentation. Our data told us that our solution would work, and that it was an accurate scaled size, and that it was an affective solution. We received positive feedback, and we are excited to continue with our solution.
Our day with the faculty went well, and the faculty members thought it was a smart idea; we learned that we could make our solution better by communicating with more people that specialize in low velocity air dropping, which is our solution. We are going to contact people in the US army that are designers and coordinators of airdrops. We have several people that we would like to talk to, and we plan to do that going forward. Most of the faculty had not heard of low velocity air drops, so they could only offer so much advice, but we got a few valuable tips, like how we plan to get the parachutes to land somewhere, and how we will distribute them evenly. Once we have contacted air drop specialists in the army, we will have our final solution. We are planing to start designing prototypes this week, made out of wood instead of metal. This solution will work really well because there are often shortages of supplies, and people cannot get access to them because trucks and emergency vehicles cant get to the disaster site, because transportation routes are destroyed. However, planes do not face any of those problems, and they can drop supplies with ease. We learned that this is a problem, and we heard from someone that a family member did not have supplies after a hurricane for a very long time- many many weeks- because there were not enough trucks and vehicles to deliver supplies and too much traffic to get into the disaster site because few roads were open. But with airdropping, that wouldn’t be a problem because planes like the c-130 can drop hundreds of tons of supplies into a disaster site with a single pass. It is much easier to use one plane and load it to drop all of the supplies than use hundreds, sometimes thousands of trucks to move supplies slowly into the site of a disaster, clogging roads that should be used to evacuate people and get emergency transports to treat the ill. We expect and hope our results to work well, and gain support from organizations all around the world. We are very excited to finish our solution.
Our group is doing hurricanes.
I don’t think we have any personal ties to hurricanes, but we chose this topic because it is a very large disaster that has happened a lot in the past few years. Our narrowed subtopic might be relief from hurricanes, or ways we can help evacuate people from affected areas. We came to this subtopic because it is a large problem that destroys countless homes and businesses, and we think there is a lot we can do to help. This subtopic interests us because there are so many possibilities for ideas. Over the last week, we have decided that our problem is hurricane relief supply drops. We landed on that aspect of a larger problem because we heard of how hard it is to get supplies to a disaster site, and how supply drops are used to do get emergency materials to a disaster site. We think that there are not enough supply drops, and these drops don’t drop enough materials or good materials. We are planning to design a better capsule and release mechanism for the drops. The current capsules are just large wooden crates, but we would make reusable capsules that can also be used for other storage uses for personal belongings in a hurricane. The capsules will have supplies for everything in the hurricane. That includes emergency shelters, rations, and better medical kits. Also, supply drops are generally just large crates, dropped into a disaster area for the community to share.* We are planning to drop individual capsules that hold the essentials for families, instead of just a community supply. Supply drops happen in many disasters, mostly hurricanes and tropical storms, but also in things like fires and earthquakes. But there are not enough supply drops, and they don’t have enough supplies per drop. We were also thinking that the parachutes from the drops could double as shelters. * Our final product is air dropping. We are going to sent air drops to places in need from a hurricane. We have created a model of a low velocity air drop so we can take data from our tests to improve our project. Our data was very important and it showed us how we needed to change our drop and how heavy the load could be. We could have made the air drop kit bigger and more secure because of the fact that it would of held more medical supplies.
Since our last post, we have done more research and more work on the online handouts that were given to our group. Our focus is still narrowed down to Hurricane relief. I have learned that Hurricane relief is a subject that is not addressed hugely by corporations. We have found information and a few sites that state that Hurricane relief is a huge problem that is overlooked, and that is why we are doing lots of research on this. We have not reached out to anyone as of now but we plan to reach out to many people via email or phone call. Our topic is an extreme importance to us. Countless people die because of the fact that people who experience hurricanes do not get the proper care they need to stay healthy.
My group is very hardworking. Although we have the difficult topic of Hurricanes, we strive to keep up with everyone and maintain good research. My group consists of two people. My group mate is Wyatt. My name is Jordan. We work very well together and we together have learned a lot of new things about Hurricanes. Hurricanes is our first subject but we narrowed it down to Hurricane relief. Hurricane relief is the process of helping people get out of the danger zone of a Hurricane. We hope to make a lot of progress with our continuous research.
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