Pop Can Hero Engine By: Chelsey Lam, 4B

Hero Rocket History The writings of Aulus Gellius, a Roman, tell a story of a Greek named Archytas who lived in Tarentum, now a part of southern Italy. Somewhere around the year 400 B.C., Archytas mystified and amused the citizens of Tarentum by flying a pigeon made of wood. Escaping steam propelled the bird suspended on wires. The pigeon used the action-reaction principle, which was not stated as a scientific law until the 17th century. About three hundred years after the pigeon, another Greek, Hero of Alexandria, invented a similar rocket-like device called an aeolipile. It, too, used steam as a propulsive gas. Hero mounted a sphere on top of a water kettle. A fire below the kettle turned the water into steam, and the gas traveled through pipes to the sphere. Two L-shaped tubes on opposite sides of the sphere allowed the gas to escape, and in doing so gave a thrust to the sphere that caused it to rotate. The history of the rocket goes back a long time before our modern science!

Newton’s Third Law of Motion Newton’s third law states that whenever one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body exerts an equal and opposite force on the first. For every reaction, there is an equal and opposite reaction

Lab The hypothesis that I formed is that the smaller and less holes there are in the can, the slower and less revolutions the can will have. To start the lab, I took four soda pop cans and punctured the cans with various size nails and with varying hole numbers. I then immersed each can in water and took the cans out of water to count how many revolutions the can experienced

Lab Data Nail SizeNumber of Holes Number of Revolutions 4D13 8D12 10D414 12D15 16D D

Conclusion Based on the results of the Hero Engine, my hypothesis is correct because with only one hole, the force of the water can only be exerted through that hole, making the engine slower and vice versa, if there is more than one hole, the engine will go faster because the force of the water can be exerted through the multiple holes.

Bibliography ts/history_of_rockets.html ts/history_of_rockets.html Conceptual Physics, 10 th Edition by Paul G. Hewitt