Driving Question: To design an object for maximum surface area or volume.

Milestone one

 In milestone 1 we chose what we were going to design and how we were going to maximize surface area or volume.

My object

I decided to design/make a Catamaran. A Catamaran is a boat with 2 skinny hulls in parallel with each other. In this design I decided to maximize surface area because of the flat base of the boat, the large sail and so it could travel faster.

Milestone 2

In milestone 2 we designed our objects using an app called Tinkercad. The shapes I used in my design were 4 rectangular prisms,1 triangle, 1 pyramid, 8 triangular prisms and 2 cylinders. I used mostly rectangular and triangular prisms because these were the shapes we had learned  formulas for.

Formulas 

The formulas I used were 

Rectangular Prism: 

Surface area= 2(lxw) + 2(wxh) + 2(lxh)

Area= lxwxh

Triangular prism: 

Surface area= 2(bxh) +(lxs1)+(lxs2)+(lxs3) 2

Area= (bxh)xl

Cylinder:

Surface area= 2πr2 +(πdh)

Area= πr2xh

Pyramid:

Surface area= The formal for this was insanely complicated but basically you find the area of the 4 sides using bxh/2 then find the area of the bottom square and add them together

Area= lxwxh/3

Catamaran model    

Milestone 3

Milestone 3 was doing the calculations of every object and finding the total surface area/volume of your design. Finding the total volume was fairly easy because you just had to add all the shapes volume up but finding the surface area was more difficult because you had to subtract the sides of shapes that were touching other shapes. Here are my calculations.  

Did I achieve my beginning goal 

As I said in the beginning of this post my goal was to have a higher surface area than volume, mainly for faster speed (which is what catamarans are designed for). In the end I didn’t achieve my goal, but I was close. I had an ending surface area of 48,117.90 and an ending volume of 50,428.98cm which means my overall ratio was 1.05:1, volume to surface area. I was very close to my goal but to fully achieve it I think I could have made the sail bigger and the cabin smaller.

Conclusion 

I had a lot of fun doing this project and getting to actually design something. One day I want to become a designer so it was cool learning how to use design software. Thanks for reading! Have a great rest of your day 🙂 .