Bridges
This Seminar was held by Mr. Fetting and Mrs. Sladek, it ran from Feb.1st - Feb.27th. I really enjoyed this seminar but it wasn't my favorite because of the lit circles and the math. The lit circles were created because we were reading a book about bridges. I didn't find the book to be that interesting because it was based off of bridge building but that's just my opinion. At first the math was really difficult and I had a hard time following along with the explanations but near the end I had mostly figured it out. The best part of the seminar was the building process of our bridges. First we needed to make a design on paper, then put that design into bridge designer, then put that design into MDSolids, and finally create it in AutoCAD. With the AutoCAD design printed out to scale we started to cut out the pieces of our bridge using 1/8 balsa wood
(balsa not recommended). We used wood glue to glue the pieces together and the only other thing that we could use was 4ft of fishing line. During this process I worked with Nathan Rodman and we built the bridge together. Our bridge unfortunately did not hold any weights but still had a 1968% efficiency which we got from dividing the weight of the bridge to the weight of the cables. In the end I learned a lot about the challenges in building a bridge, how they work, and the math behind them. |
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