Week 4: WPBD

For the past couple of weeks, our group was assigned to brainstorm with an idea of a serviceable bridge that also satisfies a set of constraints. To test out our individual idea, our group was introduced to West Point Bridge Design software. This was great software that helped us understand gravity behind designing a bridge. The West Point Bridge Design software was a very helpful tool in terms of visualizing the structural behavior and mechanism involved in the designing process. One of the realistic features in the West Point Bridge designer is that it calculates the cost of the bridge as it gets built. The cost consists of four components such as materials cost, connection cost, product cost, and site cost. The software helps us discover the most economical methods to design a bridge. One of the methods is to use hollow tubes for compression members and solid bars for tension members.

Along with constructing a bridge, the software provides an exaggerated animation of the constructed bridge. After the animation the software would also provide a feedback on what worked well and which members in the bridge failed to satisfy the task. The West Point Bridge Designer was realistic and helpful in understanding the factors that impact a bridge design in an ideal world. To build a real bridge design there needs to be more factors that needs to be addressed such as the location of the bridge, snow, labor cost, wind, and other loads that will impact the bridge design. Another major priority of a serviceable should be to with stand certain natural disasters such as earthquakes, and floods. Overall, the software was a great foundation for understanding the basic concepts that is involved in constructing a serviceable bridge.

During the previous week in class, we compared and analyzed different bridges that designed by other groups. This was a great way to understand different techniques and mechanism that can be applied in enhancing our bridge design. We also learned a great lesson about not getting too fancy with the bridges cause the objective is to design a serviceable bridge with the minimum cost. After the class discussion, our group was able to combine all the individual bridge designs into a single a design with a cost range of 230,000 dollars. During the process we learned the advantages in shortening the size of the solid bars and replacing the solid bars with hollow tubes. For next week, we will be introduced to the KNEXs and perform truss analysis.