Post Week 4

Last week during our lab period our group was required to bring our already done bridge designs to class so that as a group we could create our the best design possible and submit it to the competition. all of our designs were different. To create the best bridge possible we analyzed each individual member and how forces were acting on it. Based on that we continued by taking out any member that wasn't essential for the structure and minimizing the material used we cut costs at the maximum. Our final bridge design was estimated to cost around 250 thousand dollars, this came down from about an initial cost of 400 thousand.
West point bridge design is a very realistic representation of a real bridge. One of the problems that this program has is that apart from gravity it doesn't consider any other external forces. For example when a bridge is constructed the wind that interacts with the bridge is very important for the design. Something like what happened with the Tacoma Narrows bridge where the wind frequency was just right to make the bridge act the way it did. In this sense the program is unrealistic because it ignores other forces like age, wind, traffic accidents and more traffic. Other than that the program seems to accurately represent the forces a bridge has and although when the simulation runs the bridge bends exceedingly it still works well.