How Does a Hovercraft Work? Share your story with Science Buddies! Yes, I Did This Project! Please log in or create a free account to let us know how things went. Sara Agee, Ph. Science Buddies Staff. Accessed 11 Nov. Introduction A hovercraft is a vehicle that glides over a smooth surface by hovering upon an air cushion. Bibliography Read this article to understand how a hovercraft works: Woodford, C.
Retrieved February 27, Here are three design sources for this science project: Questacon. CD Balloon Hovercraft. Retrieved October 6, Try this at home! Balloon Hovercraft. Retrieved August 23, Balloon Hovercrafts: Made! Ready to scale up? Here is a design for building a large hovercraft you can ride on: Beaty, Bill. Can lift several adults! Science Hobbyist. For help creating graphs, try this website: National Center for Education Statistics.
Create a Graph. Retrieved June 2, Note: A computerized matching algorithm suggests the above articles. It's not as smart as you are, and it may occasionally give humorous, ridiculous, or even annoying results! Learn more about the News Feed. Materials and Equipment Pop-top lid from a plastic drinking bottle, sometimes found on reusable plastic drinking bottles. This valve is available at some hardware stores, in the plumbing section, or it can be purchased from Amazon.
If you use a pop-top lid you can use either the craft glue or epoxy, but if you use the straight valve you should use epoxy. Medium-size balloons should be able to inflate up to at least 11 inches ; available from Amazon.
Experimental Procedure First you will construct the base of the hovercraft, so gather your supplies and prepare a craft space. Remove a pop-top lid from a plastic drinking bottle. Alternatively, if you are using a straight valve, get the valve out and take a look at it so you know how it works. Although modern hovercraft often use propellers on their tops to create air currents that are pushed beneath it, in this activity you used a balloon to create air currents.
The air currents in your hovercraft traveled through the pop-top lid to go beneath the hovercraft. Because the pop-top lid stayed the same, the opening that allowed air to go beneath the hovercraft was always the same size.
This allowed you to test balloons inflated to different sizes. The large balloon held the largest amount of air and should have allowed the hovercraft to stay aloft for the longest amount of time. However, some variation of just a few seconds among the three trials with each size may have been apparent because the balloon was probably not the exact same size each time you inflated it. Likewise, because the small balloon held the least amount of air and the medium balloon held an intermediate amount, the small balloon should have allowed the hovercraft to fly for the least amount of time and the medium balloon should have allowed it to hover for an intermediate duration.
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Go Paperless with Digital. Build a Cooler. Get smart. In fact some are so poorly conceived their payload is zero! They can only start from land, getting up to speed before going over water. Amphibious Marine uses modern composite materials to reduce the weight of the craft so it can do more work for you. Another advantage of a light weight efficient design is less power used, better fuel economy and less noise for you and your neighbors.
I hope this helped you better understand how hovercraft work. Hovercraft Systems Engineering One of the key design points for a successful hovercraft is keeping the weight to a minimum. Hovercraft come in all shapes and sizes from giant passenger ferries that can carry hundreds of people to smaller beach rescue craft and one person fun machines. Drag is the resistance that ships face as they push through water. And drag means that speeds tend to be quite low because it takes a lot of power to do all that pushing.
That means no drag, so they use less fuel. Commercial hovercrafts can get up to 35 miles an hour, whilst small one man hovercrafts can do 70 miles an hour! The one pointing down creates the lift to hold it above the waves, the others help it to steer. The air is held in place by a rubber skirt.
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