Bridge Process

Now that the term is almost over, I can take the time to reflect on what I have learned.  Before I had taken this class, I didn’t even know what a truss was, let alone that it was a type of bridge.  I was new to this whole topic and was forced to learn a lot in order to succeed in this class.  I thought it was really interesting that bridge designing was such an intense process.  It really has a lot of little details that need to be perfected in order to have a successful bridge.  I had no idea that so much happened behind the scenes during the planning stages of a bridge.  It really is a complicated process.  You need to consider what type of materials to use, how big/long the bridge will be, what type of gusset plates to use, the angles of the trusses, the thickness of each member.  The list goes on and on.  I am just so amazed that all of this goes on.  It has really opened my eyes up to what engineers have to do when designing a real life project. 

Last week in class my group tested our three foot design.  Unfortunately, we weren’t doing very well.  We changed our design a few times and added a lot of gusset plates and more members.  We knew we were raising the cost of our bridge, but it didn’t hold a lot of weight at all.  Our bridge kept failing due to the twisting of the members at the joints.  We tried putting in cross sections in the middle of the bridge to reduce this twisting, but we didn’t get to test it again so we weren’t sure how it was going to work. We hope that this has made our bridge stronger, especially since it is now more expensive.  Next week we hope our prediction of a low weight is wrong.