Schetley Weekly Blog - Week 4

This week we worked on our bridge in West Point Bridge Designer, trying to prefect our bridge design to maximize strength while at the same time reducing cost. I, personally am getting more and more comfortable with the West Point software, so it is getting easier to use and really analyze what the data from the software is telling me. For the coming week, my group and I plan to learn even more about bridges, continue to prefect our design, and overall make progress with this project. I feel like we still can lower the cost by adjusting material type and size in the future, and hopefully we can without drastically altering the design of the bridge. As for West Point Bridge Designer itself, I feel like it is a good representation for the bridge design process with the many different features of the software, such as the ability to alter concrete type, anchor points, number of piers, and number of lanes, and those features are just the setup before the actual design of the bridge. Once in the actual design part, the ability to alter member size, placement, and material really gives a good look at bridge designing complexity. While I do think that it is a good software, I feel that it is a good basic software. The software to me is not as intricate and realistic as bridge design could be. When the animation plays, the bridge sags much, much more than a realistic bridge would (actual bridges sag fractions of an inch, if at all), and I feel like that takes a bit away from the realism of the system. I also feel like bridge design is more complex than place a connector at a point in space, connect a few members, repeat, then a bridge is made. But as I mentioned earlier, WPBD is a good basic, introductory software for bridge design.