A1-THOMAS

My design goals revolved around having the cheapest bridge I could create that was still able to support the weight. I prioritized cost above all on this bridge, safety second and aesthetics third. I mostly concentrated on shaving off the final price as much as I could, thus the bridge isn't very safe since most of the parts have been stressed to almost the breaking point in order to reduce cost. The bridge isn't too bad aesthetically, it's symmetrical and has a good design to it. To make this bridge, I used a bridge I had designed in class, an arc based bridge with many supports. I replaced most of the support bars with hollow tubes and lowered the thickness of the steel wherever I could in order to get my final design. I didn't really experiment with other materials so I suppose some improvements could be made if I tried other materials. My final bridge cost was $243,142.97, which I was very happy with. Throughout the design, the only major things that happened to my design was carbon steel tubes where placed wherever I thought I could safely replace bars with and the all of the bars were made as slim as I could make them. I learned about the importance of incorporating arcs into your design and how they help distribute weight a lot more effectively than a rectangular shape. Using triangles to hold up the arc made for the strongest shape I could find. After coming up with that initial vision it was a matter of making it viable cost wise. The first iteration of the bridge was somewhere around $400,000 and I managed to change it around enough to get it to the price I got in the end. My bridge is extremely risky but it's functional and fits the criteria.