Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Week3 - Yilei Jiang

This week I experienced how to build a basic truss bridge via a software, WPBD.  I knew two cross sections and three material types. Tube will be much cheaper that Bar if we think about the budget. For CS, HSS, and QTS, my bridge design was more like to use HSS because the bridge passed test as soon as I changed CS to HSS. However, HHS is more expensive than CS. Thus, QTS is a proper choice. QTS is a material that can support more tension than CS but less than HSS. And the price of QTS is between that of CS and HSS. From cross section part, I used Tube because it much cheaper than Bar. However, Bar can hold double or more tension and compression than Tube. So I think that increasing the truss' size is a good idea.

Then the question was coming after. Is there any other way that make a useful bridge and reduce the cost?
As so far, I don't have enough knowledge to support I build a prefect bridge.

So my three question will be?
What is the strongest structure that a bridge has? one side or two side? or other?
Why the bridge always fail when I first designed it, which I just followed the model WPBD gave?
If I want to know different bridge designs, what kind of books should I looked for?

For next week, we will continue the West Point Bridge Design and figure out what are necessary components of a real bridge design.

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