Pringles Structure

The Shape and Building the Structure:

We were assigned to make a structure with a hole in the middle of it out of Pringles. The shape of a Pringle is called hyperbolic parabola, more commonly known as a"saddle" shape. We often see this shape in roofs of all different type of buildings. This specific shape allows structures with hyperbolic parabolas to withhold tension and compression. Because of the slight bend in the Pringles, and the hyperbolic shape, it allows the Pringles to go into each other and have friction against each other to withstand the compression and tension. The chips have friction against each other, which allows them to stay up together and not collapse. When building our first try at building the Pringles structure, we had to make the base with the Pringles close together to make a strong base for the delicate chips to be able to withstand tension and compression of all the chips on top of each other, but we quickly learned that we could not just keep creating the base because it would never create a full circle and would end up just being a very tall base. We then began progressively making the end of the chip stick out a little further each time from the back of the last chip, and this started making the chips create a circle, and we we had to keep making it go a little further and further for each chip, and making it layered so it can still withstand compression and tension, and eventually we made the full circle. It was thin layered at the top, we could have kept adding layers, but once I placed more Pringles on top, I did not do it delicately and dropped it, so it made the chips shift and fall, so it broke, but we did complete the project and learned the advantages to a strong base of a structure and also the advantage of a hyperbolic parabola as the shape of materials of the structure. We also learned that no matter how we built the Pringles structure, as long as it came full circle, regardless of base, the diameter of the circle would be 10 cm.