Mechanical & Civil Engineering

Civil Engineering

Civil engineering is a discipline that applies physical and scientific principles in order to design, construct, and manage different types of infrastructure.

Mechanical Engineering

Mechanical engineering is the study of physical machines that involve movement and force. Mechanical engineers use engineering principles and problem-solving techniques to design, develop, build, and test objects that move.

Building and Design Process

First designs of the bridge

Bridge base

This design was the first layer of our bridge. It was intended to create a stable base in which the four planks were put together and placed sideways, skewed, to measure the 4ft, and to place the road on top of.

Second layer

This design was the second layer of our bridge. It was on top of the base of the bridge in order to provide more surface are that the car would go on. The planks would be placed sideways in order to ensure more stability and distribute weight.

Third layer

This design was the third layer of our bridge. It was intended to join the sideways planks from the top with three planks so the cart could roll across while relocating the wight distribution.

Re-Design

Our first design had to be changed as we learned that the bridge needed to stand one foot above the tables.

The Archway

In order to have the most efficient way to have a stable and strong enough structure to hold the weight of the bridge, we used the physics of arch structure beneath the base of the bridge.

Materials Saving

The redesign implied reducing our material usage in order to relocate our materials for the one-foot clearance. This is the final result. Our group tried to make the bridge a foot off the table by making two legs. our third leg for the measurement.

3D design

This was the design in its final form. The first layer can be seen in the bottom right side of the image in which the road is built. The second layer lies under the road. The trusses were a last-minute implementation in which the sticks given as materials were put to use. However, this design was not able to fulfill the requirement where the bridge has to be a foot higher off the table due to the lack of the materials given; thus, the group 13 redesigned the whole process in order to have a bridge with a stable structure.

Building Process

Building process

Drawings Final Draft

Cutting process

The team went out to chop trees to get their materials. We chopped them to small sizes as Jake, one very valued team member, does so in the image above.

Size

We cut down the sticks we were given to fit (10 cm) between our bridge walls.

Trusses

Our design includes trusses inside the bridge road to ensure stability and strength.

Results

Testing our bridge out

3D Print

Final Outcome

Bridge video.MOV

Our bridge in action!

Our bridge managed 9 bricks. The component that failed was the road, it wasn't thick enough and the wheels made holes in it with the weight of the bricks. Besides that, we had a very strong bridge.

The solution could have been to thicken the road or increase the cart's road contact area to distribute weight.

Week 3 Research Paper: Building Bridges

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