Honors Engineering: Week Nine

I was out of town this week, so I wasn't able to do as much research as normal. While I was out of town though, I went to a museum where there was a large display of paper. This reminded me of paper airplanes, which made me think of aerodynamics. I know a lot about how aerodynamics work, but I have heard that aerodynamics don't apply to things under a certain size, so I decided to find out what size that was.

I found out that all things are affected by aerodynamics, but their ability to fly based on that is greater the larger the object is. So, if you threw a paper airplane and a paper-ball made out of same size paper, aerodynamics will obviously favor the plane because there is less area for wind to resist against. However, the difference in distance might only be a few feet. If you have a ball the size of an actual airplane though, most likely it wouldn't even be able to get off of the ground because the level of resistance would be too great.