By Patrick Hedlund
DNAinfo News Editor
COOPER SQUARE — Cooper Union engineering students weren't yolking around Tuesday when they competed in the college's annual egg-drop contest.
The students were tasked with building a capsule that could safely house one raw egg — and prevent the shell from cracking after dropping the homemade contraptions off the third floor of the college's Foundation Building on East 7th Street.
The contest, which is traditionally a rite of passage for middle-school physics classes, was elevated by the students' refined knowledge of the engineering field.
"We had a bad value of the viscosity of the ketchup," said Cooper Union junior Sean Davis, who filled his egg module with the popular condiment in a bid to keep the shell from shattering on impact (it didn't work).
"I did one of these in middle school, and unfortunately that one worked."
Others, like sophomore teammates Moshe Hamaoui and Danny Kanner, had better luck by attaching a trash bag to their device so it would parachute to the ground.
"Duct tape and garbage is the key to victory," said Hamaoui, who acknowledged that he and his partner whipped up their contraption just a half-hour before the contest, and still kept the egg from cracking.
"[Professors] teach us a lot about using whatever material you get," Kanner noted. "We're very used to, on the fly, coming up with designs with limited resources."
The goal of the exercise, which is part of the students' course in "injury biomechanics and safety design," was to analyze all the variables engineers take into account when studying things like automobile crashes or sports injuries, said associate professor David Woottoon.
"It's a really good teaching tool," said the former General Motors engineer, who is also director of the Cooper Union's Maurice Kanbar Center for Biomedical Engineering. "It's a way of trying to encapsulate the concepts of safety and engineering."
Wootton's expertise ultimately helped him claim the egg-drop crown, as his gelatin-filled, Styrofoam-packaged capsule kept the egg intact.
But such a complicated design doesn't always prove the mark of success, he noted, as Wootton preserved his egg last year by simply baking a loaf of bread around it.
Overall, just two out of the five participants walked away with unbroken eggs — though success meant different things to different competitors.
"We'll probably take it home," Kanner said of his unharmed egg, "and eat it later."
