Week 6:Analysis Desires

This week we made a few minor modifications to our bridge as we had thought about ways to improve our design before testing. This week in lab we tested our bridge to see how much weight it would hold and ours held 48.4lbs of sand, the most in the class, the cost associated with building our bridge was also amongst the highest in the class which results in a poor cost to strength ratio. This coming week we will refine our design and begin to work toward a working three foot bridge. With the success of our first bridge we have a good starting point for the second design, we just need to work on reducing the cost. As a team we are facing no issues and as an individual I am happy with our progress in the class.

With our bridge constructed using Knex it would be nice to be able to know the forces that each beam is experiencing, specifically the compression of the members that causes them to bow out. Another quantity that would also be useful to us is the force that each joint of the gusset plate is experiencing and what they are capable of handling. When the bridge fails the beams are not breaking, in some cases they are bowing out however the beam is not the point of failure, the gusset plate is the point of failure. Every bridge fails at its weakest point and in the case of Knex the weakest link of the bridge is the gusset plate, in order to determine the load that a bridge can handle we need to know the forces acting on the gusset plate. In order to calculate the force that each gusset plate is experiencing I think that we need to break the force down into its components via trig functions and add the forces but I am not sure how to take into account that the load is being spread across the structure and is not being focused to one particular point.