Week 7 Post

Last week we tested out our bridge, The Love Train.  Our bridge ended up holding 29 pounds of sand.  We made a small adjustment by adding two beams across the bridge towards the end.  Although it did not count for the competition in class, we tested it again.  Surprisingly the results were much better, holding over just 47 pounds of sand.  The bridge cost somewhere around $160,000.  In the coming weeks our team has agreed to work on the 36" long bridge.  I believe we plan on keeping the same basic design, but we want to make improvements where we failed last time.  Last time the bridge was swaying from side to side, so we are going to add support to stop the bridge from swaying.  This should allow the bridge to hold more sand.  The major accomplishment our team had this week was adding the two beams, one on each side, that allowed our bridge to hold almost 20 more pounds of sand.  This addition should help our design greatly for the future competition.  In the future we may have some issues fixing the bridge so that it meets the new requirements, including being built so that cars can drive across the bridge.  We may have to move a couple of beams higher so that cars can realistically drive across the bridge.

For the knex pieces, it would be nice if each piece could be analyzed like the pieces in WPBD were.  For example, if I knew the ratios of compression and tension on each knex piece, I could rearrange the design, and possibly even the size of the bridge.  Sadly, I do not know how I could do these calculations for each piece.  But I would be more than willing to listen to ideas and try to do the calculations on my own time.