Bridge Building Designs

In our community they wanted to build a new bridge, so we wanted to test if the design they had in mind was the strongest. First we designed 2 different bridges, a truss bridge and a suspension bridge (which they had in mind), and tested which one was the strongest and which one should be built in our community.

Step 1 Materials

What you will need

- Popsicle sticks
- Hot glue
- Glue
-drill
-bucket
-weights
-string
-block of wood

Comments

[Garrett Boon]

Nice popsicle stick bridges. I especially like the looks of your arched bridge. Nicely done.

[irockalot99]

NICE BRIDGE!!!!!!!

[Mathegenius]

How many popsticks do we need

[Dino!2]

how many layers are there ? is there suppose to be 2 or 3 layers ?

[KEYBOARDISBROKEN]

expierence shows that usually the taller you make the bridge, the stronger it is...

[Kilsmer]

if you don't mind me asking, what is your community? because there isn't many small society's where I'm from lol

[james_1024]

While this is a good test of design the fixings used in the model may not have the same strength (could be higher or lower!!) that those used in a full scale "production" bridge. Also the test only accounts for static point loading, not for dynamic loading e.g. people walking across it, wind etc. In the tests you are loading the bridge deck as foundations, not the structure and it is this that fail in bridge A not the structure. I suggest that if the you were to repeat the test with bridge structure resting on the table not the bridge deck you may get different results. Just FYI my University use this same method to teach basis of bridge design to undergrads, it allows you to explore the different types of bridge through experimentation rather than just in text books and on paper.

[fwjs28]

very good desings...triangles are a superb buliding block as the don't collapse as a square or circle or something like that do...