Construction Day 4 (Final)

Today was our final meet up for the rollercoaster. After completing the first vertical loop from the previous gathering, our intentions were to finish off the 2 hills and banked turn. We started off by constructing the first hill to an approximate height of 15cm by using another 3 metre strip of aluminium. After accomplishing this, we attached our hot wheels “banked turn”. Since the width of the tracks were similar, the tracks would be compatible with the pre-existing aluminium strip, and these were attached by screws. For the barriers, we had 2 reinforcements. An initial strip of foil tape was attached under the bottom of both sides and folded upright to prevent the car from falling off. The second barrier of packaging tape was then placed over the foil tape to maximise the smoothness of the sides. After this, we decided to put our car to the test. Unfortunately, there was one main issue: the hill was unable to create enough kinetic energy to maintain speed to pass the banked turn. After testing this several times, we also noticed that the car would occasionally jump over the hill. Thus, there was only one possible solution to this issue: we had to increase the height of our hill to roughly 25cm. After putting it through another test, the car was still unable to travel through the banked turn and so we made a few minor adjustments. Several books were placed under the platform directly under the entrance of the first vertical loop, along with the placement of books near the bottom of our first hill. This idea would maximise the gravitational potential energy of the car as it travelled through the roller coaster, as well as providing stability to the car. Our theoretical idea turned out to be successful as the rollercoaster was able to generate enough energy to pass through the banked turn.

We finished off with the construction of the final hill and made sure its height was at a minimum: only 5cm in height due to the fact that the banked turn did not provide enough energy to travel up a steep hill. After several finishing touches, we put our car through one final test, which turned out to be successful. The car was able to travel throughout the entire rollercoaster on camera, along with various snapshots of footage of the car passing through each section of the track, wrapping up our rollercoaster project.