Pasta Bridge Test

Bridge building project for Engineeing .
The aim was to design and construct a bridge using nothing more than 200g of Number 8 San Remo pasta and 3 packs of sellys quick set super glue. This is the video of our groups design being tested at the end of the project. Our bridge weighed in at 183g total, and supported a weight of 17.5kg.
The failure occurred in one of the compression beams in the far side (in the video) at a location where it had been damaged during construction and was thinner than the rest of the beam. The near side then failed at a similar location and finally the desck failed in shear as the supporting structure had now been compromised. By testing and calculation, if the bridge had been perfectly constructed, we believe it possibly could have supported near 40kg to 50kg. The design was sound however the implementation was not 100%.
A fault with our design was placing the thinner tension beams between the thicker compression beams that meant that the full ends of the compression beams were not touching effectively narrowing the surface area under compression at these points. Our team placed 6th in our group of approximately 30 entries from our university class.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Pasta
• Bridge
• Weight
• Test

[Starfireaw11]

Nice work :)