Skip - Week 4 Blog Entry

This week we used West Point Bridge Designer to design the cheapest bridge that would still support the weight of the truck running over it. We worked as a team and worked on it and was able to make the bridge cheaper than our original design, but we were not able to beat the cheapest bridge in the class. In the coming week, we were told that we would start using Knex to actually make a bridge so my teammates and I agreed to work on actually making an actual bridge using the Knex. We will try to build bridge that will most likely be the base design for our final bridge. We will build off of this bridge and make improvements to make a strong bridge in the end. The major accomplishment this week was that we were able to design a bridge that was about $24,000 bridge that could still hold the weight of the truck running over it. The only issue this week was that we could not beat the group that made a cheaper bridge. Besides that, there were no problems. The group is in good shape working together and discussing things as a group.

I think that West Point Bridge Designer does a good job in making it realistic because first of all, it lets us design things freely. In the real world, we can design freely, and this program allows this. Yet, in all this freedom, there are real world constraints such as the specific span lengths ans support configurations. The cost is also realistic because it corresponds the material used, how big it is, how long it is, how it is shaped, etc. The program also is realistic in simulating the forces on the bridge on its own and when a vehicle runs on top of it. It is not close to the real world in the sense that they disregard some important factors such as wind, possible collisions, and earthquakes. In the real world, they must also regard symmetry but the program does not do this on the vehicular weight test because it only tests if the bridge would be standing if the truck went from the left side and the right side. Over all, I do think that the program is realistic and reliable.