Week 4

During last week's lab the group worked own modifying our own bridge designs to achieve the lower possible cost. After editing all our designs we found the bridge that had the lowest cost near the end of class and worked together to finely edit the design to the best of our abilities.
Next week our group is going to review what must be done for assignment 2. Also we will start the process of how we can successfully build our chosen design out of Knex. We will have to adapt to use the pieces that are available to build a design that most closely resembles our WPBD design.
Major accomplishments achieved this week in lab were that our group was able to come up with two designs under $260,000.00 and eventually fine tune one below $250,000.00.
The biggest problems that I see arising next week in lab will be the group's ability to convert a design created on WPBD to an actual bridge constructed of Knex. The Knex will not grant us as much freedom in the positioning of bars and connecter plates as WPBD. Our design my need to be edited to fit the constraints of the Knex.
Many aspects are not addressed in the WPBD program that would come heavily into play in reality. Forces such as wind, rain, and erosion are important factors that could deteriorate the condition of a bridge to the point of failure. WPBD also only considers what will occur if one truck crosses the structure at a time, if a bridge is near failure with one truck on it for a short amount of time multiple vehicles on it for an extended period of time will be sure to result in failure. If the bridge is put in a heavily used area where traffic builds up it, it'll be sure to collapse under the large load. The design also doesn't consider the affects that the build up of snow and ice may cause either. The weather is the largest factor that will greatly affect how a bridge is built and depending on the location of the bridge certain factors must be considered.

Robert Weldon - Group 10