West Point Bridge Design

Last week each student in the class submitted their own bridge design to our professor, James Mitchell, online via a survey. In class we compared the results of each bridge side-by-side. My bridge, coming in at close to $590,000, was one of the most expensive. The least expensive bridge had a cost of just below $250,000. I clearly wasn't going to be winning this first competition.

For the rest of that class period, each group was to analyze the bridges each member of the group had created. My group members and I decided that we would benefit the most by attempting to build a bridge entirely from scratch on West Point Bridge Design, keeping one goal in mind: have a cost below $250,000. After about 50 minutes had passed, the least expensive bridge we could design would cost about $440,000. I was happy with this, however, because in about a day I'd learned how to reduce the cost of a bridge by over $100,000.

My group and I decided we would play around on WPBD before our next class together, but our group's bridge had already been submitted and there was no way we could do anything to change our design's official status until the next class. I am very much looking forward to seeing the results of the competition between groups in class tomorrow. I'm sure our bridge is not the least expensive, but maybe it is the safest or the most durable. On another note, the group is not having any trouble working together. So far we haven't run into any issues that we cannot fix by simply looking in a book or asking a question to someone with a good understanding of bridges.

Going back to the WPBD program, I have noticed that some aspects of it are not very realistic, however, the program helps the used understand many important areas of civil engineering. As we discussed in class, when you test a bridge, the program exaggerates the displacement of the bridge's road surface so that the user can easily see how significant the changes are that they make to their bridge.

Without even realizing it, users of WPBD are learning how civil engineers use computers as tools to help them perfect their designs. This program calculates the stress on each member of the bridge and displays it in a chart within a fraction of a second after running the test mode for a bridge design. This saves time for the civil engineer and allows them to make more changes to their designs without having to go through the process of manually calculating all the forces acting on each member of each bridge design.

Personally, my favorite part of WPBD is that it calculates the cost of my bridge for me. Every time I change the size, material, or structure of a member, the cost automatically updates. This makes it easy to avoid heading in the wrong direction with a design and ends up saving alot of time. The program provides standard options for bridge materials and dimensions which helps users learn which materials are the best for designing bridges.

Overall, the program is unrealistic in the sense that it does not account for certain forces which act on bridges. Wind is something that can significantly affect a bridge in reality, but the program does not provide for such a force. All of the things that program does do accurately definitely help the user speed up the process of designing a bridge.