Planning stage

The first thing we did before actually designing the cannon was to find the things of what we didn’t want the cannon to do. This is so that we will be able to get the best possibly distance that our cannon can actually shoot the tennis ball.

What we had listed was that we didn't want it to have a great chance of misfiring and we didn’t want it possibly break our cannon. The things that we did want for us to do, was that we wanted it to have a sturdy structure and that it had an airtight seal allowing us to increase the pressure.

After this we split our team of four into two teams of two. One team researched the formula that we would need in order to find the correct angle to tilt it at, and the other team starting the design of what the cannon will look like. We knew that we wanted to have as much pressure as possible to be built up inside the cannon.  In order to do this we made the bottom half an inch smaller to increase the pressure. (This is Boyle’s Law which is when temperature and pressure are indirectly related)  We would also poke a pencil-size hole in the bottom of the top half in order to create even more pressure. Because of part of our group working on this the other part found two equations that would help us. The two equations are listed below

·         y = ax²+bx+c

·         x = vt(cos)Ө

o    x = the distance the ball would travel

o    v = velocity

o    t = time the ball was in the air

o    (cos) = co-sign

o    Ө = angle of the cannon

We soon realized that we would have to guess at some of our numbers that are needed, such as the velocity and the number of seconds that the ball was in the air, in order to find out how far it would be able to go.

We plugged the numbers into the equation and got x=(1ft/sec)(5 sec)(cos)( angle of cannon) the only thing we had left to fill in was the correct angle of which the cannon would be at. We started at an angle of 25 ^o then later worked our way up. We tested the range of angles to tilt our cannons at then narrowed it down depending whether or not the final value would be the largest number or not. The angles we chose were 25 ^o, 26 ^o, 40 ^o, 35 ^o, 30 ^o, and 28 ^o. Though later we realized that the best angle would be at 27 ^o, at this angle our cannon would be able to launch the ball a distance of about 4.45 meters or about 14.49 feet.