Week 3: WPBD

Last week was spent working with West Point Bridge Designer to come up with the cheapest design for a bridge that met the constraints posted on the course website. This coming week we have agreed upon refining designs and to being the initial planning stages foe the KNEX bridge in the coming weeks. The biggest accomplishment that we had as a team was seeing that the bridges that Arron, Dan and I Designed were first, second, and third respectively in the class competition. I see no issues as an individual nor as a team.

West Point Bridge Designer is intended for Civil Engineers to get hands-on experience with bridge design. Real world design problems have many possible solutions to the problem, West Point Bridge Designer does not recognize all of the possible solutions as being correct. West Point Bridge Designer is realistic in the sense that it will not allow a bridge to span an opening that it cannot realistically span. West Point Bridge Designer is also realistic in the sense that  it incorporates the idea of trade-off, meaning that when you change you part of a design problems expectantly arise in a different part of the design. Safety is one of the most important aspect of any design, you can create a structure with the lowest cost to build but if you fail to design a structure that can safely transport what it was designed to West Point Bridge Designer will alert you to the problem. If this were applied to a real life design this simple aspect of the program could conceivable save lives. I think that the main majority of the aspects of West Point Bridge Designer are realistic but I feel if they were 100% realistic that the program would be too complex to understand and grasp, this leads me to believe that some aspects of the program are not realistic. One major component that is not realistic is the vertical displacement, this is exaggerated in West Point Bridge Designer to show that bridges do deflect when carrying a load. West Point Bridge Designer does not take into account horizontal forces such as wind either.