Friday, December 4th, 2009

Associate Professor Andy Gerhart brings a hot air balloon in for a soft landing during a testing session for student design projects held in the Buell Management Building atrium last month. During the fall semester, freshmen in Gerhart’s “Introduction to Engineering” course do seven design projects following the engineering design process. For this project, the students researched various designs and completed preliminary buoyancy calculations to predict how much payload (in the form of clothespins) their balloon design would be able to lift. During the atrium trials, the top design lifted about 50 grams of payload.

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