Bridges

Civil Engineering

Civil Engineers design, build, and maintain all public infrastructure and other buildings. They are responsible for making public infrastructure such as bridges and roads safe and operational.

Building Science

Building Science is the research of understanding how to build physical structures, utilizing an understanding of physics, math, material science, and architecture to work with engineers to build structures. 

Friday

we first drew out possible concepts on a whiteboard and removed several designs such as catilever for being too complicated, suspestion would be very hard because we cant get a bent cable. 

we had to chose was between cable strung and Pennsylvania / Petit Truss so we setched both options out in 8mm:6in ratio. we choose the petit in the end because we were concerned how well cable strung would work with balsa wood as the cable.

Weekend

we then designed the bridge in cad (solid works which Alex is used to) to plan out what we want to build. 

we then simulated the design using finite element analysis (using ansys) and found out it there exists a weak point in the bridge so we added more supports to it. after that change, the simulation says the bridge should hold 1000N+ however this does not take into account the strength of the wood

we then rendered the bridge in keyshot cuz why not

Error Analysis

We didn't consider the height of the bricks after stacking 10-12 of them. If we were able to go later in order, we would have seen more configurations to stack the bricks more efficiently in x and z space to conserve vertical space.