Week 4: WPBD

West Point Bridge Design is very excellent and useful software for engineers to understand how professionals design real structures. It is a tool that helps visualize structural behavior and also opportunity to experience the design process.  It also holds the purpose to demonstrate how engineers use computers as a tool for efficiency in their line of work. However, significant numbers of changes have been made to the software rather than the completely real life experience because they wanted it to prevent the program from being too complex. It serves to mainly demonstrate the design process and disregard the technical details of structures. Real engineers need to take many other factors under consideration for bridge efficiency and cost, such as abutments, piers, deck, all connections, concrete, framing, secondary membrane, and labor. Also the efficiency of the bridge is not tested correctly because many of the different loads are not taken under consideration, such as vehicles, self-weight, wind, snow, earthquakes, longitudinal and lateral position, and human errors. Another important issue that is missing in West Point Bridge Design is the concept of aesthetics, which is the individuals view on how a design looks good. Overall, it is a very helpful tool, but does not accurately reflect on how civil engineers really design a bridge.  Many of the West Point designs survive in the software but cannot last in the real world because it doesn’t meet the real physical requirements and effectiveness required for the project.

 Last week in class we compared bridge designs submitted by students and tried to understand what technics are the best approach. We also took a look at the design with the least estimated cost and realized that a simple design is enough, it does not have to be complex. For rest of the class we worked in groups to create the least costing bridge that is effective enough to get the truck across. Together we tried many different technics, such as material type, size, solid or hollow, etc. for the first time in the course we actually worked as one and put our thought together. For this week, I anticipate that we will finish up with learning how to create a good bridge design so that we can move on to using KNEXs. The course schedule shows that we will learn and start using KNEXs pieces to build a real bridge.