Penn State Abington engineering students celebrated the fall season by launching pumpkins with a trebuchet they built using skills acquired during their coursework. A trebuchet is a type of catapult that uses a long arm to throw a projectile.
Isaiah Wilson, a sophomore in the engineering with multidisciplinary engineering design option (MDE), explained that the design allows the trebuchet to launch projectiles of greater weights further distances than that of a traditional catapult.
“We added a crank to keep the arm down instead of using our own brute force to keep the arm in place before we launched. The crank shaft is based off of a principle I learned in my engineering mechanics class. It’s about 200 pounds of force displaced,” he said.
“Overall, the design worked pretty well, and we hope to make it stronger next year. We want to design it to safely chunk the pumpkins,” Wilson said.