During this past week in
engineering lab, my group and I worked a lot with numbers and calculating
stress and compression of each joint and chord using trigonometry and a method
called “method of joints”. For this, we first did our calculations by hand using
a lot of physics and math to find the tension forces at each gusset plate. We
then entered the dimensions and weight applied given to us into an online
system created to calculate all of our hard work in the click of a button.
Although the numbers we got from the online system didn’t match our numbers
identically, we soon found out that they were simply multiples of the numbers
we calculated. This coming week my group will create a new bridge that can span
3 feet, with the ideas that we have learned from our previous bridge.
I think
that this method of joints would be sufficient for calculating for a real
bridge. In the real world the bridges we build have to be tested somehow, and a
lot of the times, hand calculations would need to be done for them. I would
like to further analyze maybe the different ways that this tension and stress
can be relived, and how the design of the bridge can affect the forces acting
on the bridge.
Kelsey McSorley
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