Disel - Week 4 Blog Entry

This week we were able to design a cheaper bridge than the previous ones using West Point Bridge Designer. Even that we made a good job we still couldn't design the cheapest bridge on our lab section. Anyway as a team we realised that the simplest designs are the best ones in reducing cost. We were told that next week we are getting the knex, so we decided to start building the bridge with knex  as soon as we get them.
About the software West Point Bridge Designer there are some things that I don't like about it. For example it is impossible to test the bridge with other factors than weight, such as wind or earthquakes. But in general the software is really useful and helpful. We can design a lot of bridges in a few minutes using different materials  and we can also test is for the weight that can hold.

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.

Jonathan- Week 4 Blog Entry

During the week 3 lab session, all three of us were able to collaborate to try and make a superior bridge design. We were able to get a bridge that was able to stand while costing $242,000, which is a huge improvement to our individual concepts. We have decided that we are all going to try other standard templates to try and get a more efficient design going. We don't really have any conflicts yet, as we are still in the brainstorming process as to figuring out which design works best.
I think the West Point Bridge Designer can be used to help find a viable pattern of how you should design your bridge, but it does not include other factors such as wind or other random natural effects. It does however let you choose a specific span length and support configurations to match real world scenarios. It also gives you a pretty standard cost of how much your bridge will be depending on what components you use. Some trade offs to using this program is that it doesn't have any information about the fatigue of the bridge, or how long it will last with its durability. Although it does have options for difference load capacities, there are always many different kinds of combinations that need to be thought out before building the bridge, which this program doesn't have.

Week 2 Blog Post - Disel

 In our first week we were introduced about the course by a powerpoint presentation and we watched for a few minutes 3D examples of different bridges on google earth. We have started working on the bridge design using West Point Bridge Designer and we are trying to have a big number of different designs so we can choose the best one,

Teamwork
I think that the biggest issue that our group is going to face during the term is going to be building the bridge. No one of us has previous experience with bridges or structures. Anyway I am confident that our teamwork will result successful in the end. My group mates are my friends so it makes it easy to work with them. I think that most important thing in a teamwork is that each of the team members does something specific. A positive thing about my group is that all of us have three different majors, Architectural Engineering, Civil Engineering and Computer Engineering; which I think makes us perfect to work on this project. Soichiro may work more than the others in designing the bridge, I may work more on building it and Jonathan might work more with our blog. Anyway I think that each one of us should be part of every process so in the end each one of us knows in detail what we did. I am really into this project, since I think it's related to my major and I am confident that in the end we will do really good.

Disel - Week 3 Blog Entry

This week we used the West  Point Bridge Designer software to make a simple design of a bridge. Using the software was really easy and we were able to try may different things in a short time. We tried a lot of shapes but we realized that triangles are the best shape to work with because they are really stable  We also started to design our own bridge and looked for which design seemed the best. Even that we worked with the software, trying to design a bridge which would be stable so the truck could pass we were not able to design a bridge during the lab. I think that we should work more with West Point Bridge Designer software so we can build a bridge with the best performance which means that can be stable and doesn't cost too much.


Here are some questions that I want to ask Mr. Bhatt:

 1.) What would be a price in the market for a two lanes bridge 44m long that has no pier or cable anchorages  made from medium-strength concrete?

 2.) Which type of triangle is the most stable one?

A1 -Spahija

My bridge is based in triangles, especially in the top part. First my bridge had a lot of triangles which would make the cost really expensive. I reduced some of triangles which made the cost less than 500,000$ but I will keep trying to reduce the numbers of triangles so that the cost will not be as much as it is right now, 488,179.60 $ . For future improvements I am going to also try different shapes of triangles until I find the perfect triangle for each part.

Jonathan- Week 3 Blog Entry

During our third week of engineering lab, we finally got to use the West Point Bridge Designer program. Although we didn't have any background knowledge about bridges, we were able to find out what kinds of structures worked and which didn't. It was a great learning experience at the time for not having previous knowledge. Now that we know a bit more about WPBD, we are able to create our own designs that can won't collapse. We haven't really had any problems as a group, and I think we will be able to respect each other's designs when we show them to each other. We will probably take the best components from all of our designs and morph them into a super bridge. The only issue we had was that we couldn't get a functioning bridge during the class time.
Here are some questions that I want to ask Mr. Bhatt:
1) How do I know which bridge works best under which scenario? I.E why can't I use a suspension bridge all the time?
2) What are all of the variables I need be aware of when designing a bridge?
3) What are the normal price ranges for bridges? or how expensive/cheap have bridges been?