User:Mbaig5753/enes100/Bridge: My Work

Bridges

Write problem/project Goal
What is your wording of the overall problem/project goal?

To create a spaghetti arch that will support as much weight as possible.

My First Task
What are you going to do for the team this first weekend?

Look into construction techniques that is used in the real life to have arches support various loads. Also look at other previous arch designs and analyze where they went wrong and where they succeeded.

Summary of actual work over first weekend
This weekend I was assigned to look at real life arches and how they are designed to hold a large force. I did this plus look into ways on how to manipulate pasta to hold large amounts of weight, and the best glue to use.

Week1 Narrative
Tell a detailed story describing what you did for your team over the weekend. I looked at actual arch structures that are used in real life and noticed most arches use a design that incorporates two force members attached at a 45 degree angle. For example this design right here This is also the design used by the spagetti arch winner as you can see here from the top and side view. What I did over this weekend was since we already know the best design possible was to see in a constructive point of view how we can manipulate pasta to take this form and hold the most amount of weight. I noticed that having thin flattened pasta be essentially strung through the pasta that was cylindrical would give the structure more support and allow to to be flexible.

The epoxy that was also used wasn't the greatest so I did research and found that the best epoxy to use to dry on pasta is JB Weld epoxy epoxy. I learned this from discussions regarding this subject manner online discussion

My Second Task
I plan on having a working build of the arch ready and analyze it to see where the weak points are.

Summary of actual work over second weekend
I wasn't able to get a working arch together because there is stil not epoxy available to use in the workshop. I actually completed the arch and held it in place using duck-tape.

Week2 Narrative
What was done over the weekend was that I built a lot of pasta arches in sections because I knew that in testing they would break and I would have to make repairs and patches. I also looked back at the work I had did and analyze the work such as the pasta that we glued together. Heres a pic of what the section looks like.
 * Photo_1.JPG

As you can see from here I laced the hollow pasta with flat spegghatii inside it, gives it strength but also weighs the arch down. Which is a potential pitfall. Here is another photo of the pasta
 * Photo_2.JPG

The arch that we used earlier with the epoxy wasn't working well either what I learned from that is the epoxy didnt dry well. My group and I didnt do a good 50/50 split when making the compound. So when the new epoxy arrives we need to make sure we mix it properly. With the very little glue i had at home I did manage to put together some arches but I noticed that the glue I had at home added to much weight and collapsed on them self.


 * My instructor did tell us to try using wire that we can use to loop the slanted shaped pasta into. I did try that but i dont have the correct epoxy right now to use to put it all together. What I do like about the wire is that it can be easily removed and doesnt weigh the arch down like having flat shaped spegghetti running through it. It is a light, efficient and works well. I just need to get the epoxy that the Instructor is going to order.

My Third task
Meet with my group and built arches and test them with weight.

Summary of actual work over third weekend
I planned on making physical arches over this weekend, one arch was made, and tested. I then worked off of the results of the first arch. See my narrative for details.

Week3 Narrative
This weekend I met with my team members and we finished our construction of the arch. We let it sit and dry and made sure it was ready so we could add weight. From lifting it off the wooden frame we have been using it felt very fragile. I had a bad feeling about the strength of it. We tested .5 pound shoe on there and it broke the arch. Seeing this a realization came that the design was not efficient in holding weight. The design was later rebuilt using wire that was threaded through the entire arch, and then my team member Nathan bought epoxy something which has been missing from our designs because there was none in class. The slanted pasta was strung on the wire and then glued onto our wooden semi circle. As shown here

Once we applied epoxy and let the glue settle we began to take of the tape as shown in the picture. The tape is used to hold the pasta in place over the arch. Once that dried we took the tape of and began to lift the arch up. What we noticed was that firstly the epoxy wasn't strong enough the arch was starting to cave in on itself at certain points. I doubt this error was on our part in terms of mixing the epoxy because this epoxy we bought has two tubes that once squeezed pour at once. I put the blame on the epoxy not being strong enough. Also that we couldn't get the epoxy to cover all of the pasta. This is because the tape only allowed us to glue on side and not rotate. This arch was not successful it broke on itself. Our next idea was to lace the wire with wax paper because we believed the glue was sticking to the wire and having wire coated with wax paper would prevent this. From the attached picture you could see our attempt at this. It wasnt successful because of the fact that the wax paper with the wire was to hard to string through the narrow hole in the pasta.



My Fourth task
Hopefully the glue that Forester orders is stronger we plan on using that glue and making the arch in a way that arch can be glues 360 degrees, and our team member is making an assembly that can sand the pasta at a perfect angle so it glues better.

Summary of actual work over fourth weekend
I helped in the process of making the assembly for the grinding box, and built an arch again using a different construction technique.

Week4 Narrative
First all I helped my teammate Nathan with assisting him and prepping the wood for the grinding box so we could grind the noodles at the perfect angle. Moreover though this week I worked on making another arch using a design of wire running through the pasta but instead of only gluing one side of the pasta that was exposed. We would glue the top side that fit completely over the wooden frame then let it dry and flip the pasta and glue the other side of the pasta. This gave the arch added strength. We used the previous method of taping the cross sections where the pasta didn't meet each other, also utilizing wax paper. The most time extensive part of this has to to be the gluing of the noodles together because epoxy dries fast and a lot of care is involved in handling it. Making sure the pasta was held securely together and there was no slack was also tough.



The arch again wasn't very effective again we ran into issues with the glue it wasnt holding the pasta together strong enough.

Complete Team Page
Fill out the Team Form (should have already copied the form, created the team page, linked to it and started filling it out).