Land Yacht | Science

Last week and this week on science we have been working on a project on making Land Yachts, this project was related to our current topic in science, Forces & Motions. Our goal was to make the land yacht more aerodynamic and make it able to catch more wind to travel at a much further distance at such a speed. We were all put into groups, afterwards to enable the land yacht to do so travel at a far distance and faster speed we had to add things onto the land yachts.

Aim: Our goal to make the land yacht faster

Equipment:

• Land Yacht Base
• Cardboard
• Sticks(x2)
• Tape
• String
• Plastic Bag
• Leaf Blower

We were already given a base for our land yacht but the extra equipment we were given to use were cardboard, small bamboo sticks, tape, string, plastic bag & leaf blower. Our job, or my task was to make add ons because we needed to make it more aerodynamic and mentioned before to catch more wind to make the land yacht travel at a better radius and length. I decided to add a piece of cardboard on top to make the land yacht push through the wind much easily. To give the ability to the land yacht to capture more wind, we used 2 pieces of bamboo sticks(one short, one long). Then placing both bamboos in a cross looking position I then shortened the plastic bag and attached it above the land yacht. This will enable the yacht to catch more wind, that is what my hypothesis was though.

Afterwards, we did a single test to see how far it travels and how long it took for it to get to where it stopped. Using a formula we have learned about recently we took the distance and time and calculated what our speed was. Our land yacht travelled at 1 metres in 4 seconds, after the calculation our speed was 0.25m/s. Not the results we really hoped for but the experiment was enjoyable and learnt a lot along the way.

Conclusion:

So the conclusion to why our land yacht didn't go as fast is because of how the sail was setted up, it did catch wind but realising during the test was that the sail was not wide enough and if too much wind was caught it would usually turn the sail itself to the side and tilt the yacht over. The sails base wasn't stable enough to stay in one place which caused it to tilt and the plastic sail needed to be much more wider. There wasn't any testing done so we didn't know how it would have performed.  The best speed out our class was 0.656m/s.

My Teams Land Yacht