The Reality of West Point Bridge Design

West Point Bridge Designer is a great program to start designing bridges with.  It helps you to understand how to design structures, provides an idea of the engineering design process, how to improve the effectiveness of bridge designs, and provides a tool to help us figure out how structures work.  Although all of this is great, WPBD is not entirely realistic.  WPBD focuses more on the design process than the structural design of the bridge.  Although it will tell you if the design is stable for a specific computer coding, that does not mean it will work in real life situations. 

                In a real life situation, many different kinds of materials, connectors, and members are used.  West Point Bridge Design offers some variations, but not as many as engineers consider when designing a real bridge.  Engineers also have to consider roadways, weather conditions, the body of water the bridge is going over, and a three dimensional structure.  WPBD allows you to make some changes to the roadway, but not enough to get a real sense of the design.  Along with environmental concerns, bridges undergo a lot of fatigue and engineers must figure out what kind of material to use to make the bridge last as long as possible while still being efficient. WPBD does not consider this, making the user unaware of the efficiency of their bridge.  The user would also be unaware of how much weight their designed bridge could hold.  In actual bridge designing, many different forms of vehicular traffic have to be taken into account, along with the self-weight of the bridge and environmental conditions, such as snow or an earthquake.  West Point Bridge Design accounts for some failures that occur from the design, but not all that could occur on a real bridge.  Engineers must take these added failures into account, including deflections that occur from driving on the bridge or weather.  West Point Bridge Design fails to do this completely.

                Although West Point Bridge Design does not accurately represent a realistic bridge, it is a very good learning tool for students.  It focuses on the fundamentals of building and using trusses, and gives a good representation of how a bridge would act if weather, vehicular loading, and the river were not factors of the design. 

                In week 3 of lab we reviewed the results of our A1 designs and then each team developed an improved design in class. Our team’s design was improved from any of our individual designs, but did not come close to competing to the most cost efficient. Unfortunately, the lowest we could make it in the time allowed was around $41,000.  We were happy with our design but I personally wished we had more time to work on it to see how cheap we could make it. 

                For this week in lab, I hope to gain a better understanding of how a bridge holds weight as we will be using Knex for the first time.  I know we will have to document how much weight it holds and I would really like to be on my game the first time around.  I hope to accomplish an efficient design that my team will like.