Shapes of Parachutes and Descent Rates

Overview

Objectives/Goals What I wanted to find out was, if keeping the surface area constant, how does the shape of a parachute affect the descent rate of a given load? Methods/Materials To find this out I decided to create three parachutes. Each of the parachutes has the same surface area yet the shape of each parachute differs. Parachute one is a square. Parachute two is a rectangle. Parachute three is a rectangle like the second parachute with the exception that it has a shorter width and a longer length then the second parachute does. When the parachutes were created, I made a model rocket that would get the parachutes up in the sky a substantial distance so that I would have more time to collect data than if I were to drop the parachutes off a ten foot roof. The rocket provided another plus; I could place an altimeter in the payload of the rocket to help measure the height and time of the parachutes# descents. The altimeter being an electrical device helped make sure the data was more accurate. I launched each parachute three times each. That way I could collect more samples, so I could have a more accurate average decent rate for each parachute. Results I found that, as I hypothesized, the more rectangular, and less square, a given parachute is, the faster the descent rate.

Competition history

• CSEF 2008 Aerodynamics/ Hydrodynamics (Junior Division Only) · Entry J0120

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Physics and Astronomy projects
• CSEF Physics and Astronomy projects
• Every CSEF 2008 project