Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Week 4 - Yilei Jiang

    Last week, the major thing we did was building a bridge design via West Point Bridge Design, which is a program to design a virtual bridge. Because of this designed bridge, I knew the basic knowledge of  bridge building components, such as span, material, placement of the travel surface in relation to the structure, and form. The other thing I knew was the cost of a bridge design played an important role. Related to reality, the cost also always decides that a contract is signed or not. 
     
     There's a thing that only can happen in West Point Bridge Design, not in our real world. During the testing, the truck passed every time whatever the bridge I designed looks like. Sometimes, my bridge was down to the bottom of canyon. It's not a serviceable bridge in the real world. 
      
     Next week, we will get the K'Nex and I will put the knowledge I learnt from WPBD on K'Nex. We can use K'Nex as a model to build a low-cost and serviceable bridge. K'Nex is not like WPBD. It is a model made up of solid materials(members), which means it has its own tension and strength capacities. How to hold heavy objects with the K'Nex bridge is the goal during these weeks. 

No comments:

Post a Comment