User:Sang1938/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?

I will be designing numerous arch design and then will be discussing with my team mates about each other's design. Brainstorm ideas on how to attach the spaghetti together.

Summary of actual work over first weekend
I was assigned to design various way to attach spaghetti together.

Week1 Narrative
Over the weekend, I brainstormed idea on how to attach spaghetti together. Some of my ideas were to use tape and rope, but those did not hold, they were to weak and were not stable enough. I came up with a design on how to attach the spaghetti together which is shown below.



Basically, there would be a series of spaghetti inside the an outer spaghetti noodle, where there are glued together. This is an effective way of attaching them after analysing the spaghetti noodle, it is hollow inside where it would be unstable and would be easier to break because there is nothing to strengthen the inside of the tube of spaghetti, where if you filled the inside hole with another spaghetti it would be stronger because the hole would be smaller and filled where it can hold more force. This is a picture of our working progress of our arch, It has successfully curved because we do not want it to be too flexible where it can break easily and we do not want it to be too stiff where it could not curve with the arch.



My Second Task
I plan to test the strength of the arch by putting weights on and analyse the weak points and improve the structure of the arch

Summary of actual work over second weekend
Over the weekend, I brainstormed a series of designs to hold and strengthen the arch.

Week2 Narrative
Over the weekend, I sketched up a series of designs to be constructed and tested to see which ones would hold the most tension. pictures are shown below.

This design was to glue a series of noodles side-by-side, but figured this would not work because I had to glue a lot more noodles and it created more weight which is bad in competitions. This design came up, because I wanted the noodles to have more surface area touching each other rather than having the bonds be held only by glue.

This design was better because it created less weight for the noodles.

This design has not been tested, but I believe it will create even less weight.

During the construction, I found out that just having the flat ended noodles being attached with glue did not hold as well because there is no surface area for the noodles to be held on. The only thing that is holding the noodles together is the glue where there are gaps inbetween the noodles when we want to bend the series of noodles to form the arch. Picture shown below.

flat straight noodle has gaps in between when glued together to form the arch which makes the bond weaker because only the glue is holding them together

After testing out the structure on top, I recorded my frustration and tried to figure out a way for the noodles to touch each other more to have more grip on each other.

Therefore, with this problem, my team decided to file every single noodles at a certain degree or buy those slant-edged ziti noodles to have the surface area hold each other to create more grip between the noodles and be able to bend naturally, instead of forcing the noodle series to bend.

Slant-edged noodles have more surfaces touching each other, created more grip on each other, better than just having the bond held by glue.



When attaching these slant-edged noodles, we can easily form its arch without giving it tension between the noodles and the glue, just need to rearrange them to make them touch each other more and start glue them together

My Third task
Over Spring Break, I will be meeting up with my teammate to begin filing noodles and constructing the arch with a wire inside the noodle, and hopefully have time to test the strength of it.

Summary of actual work over third weekend
During Spring Break, I built the arch and began testing the strength of it.

Week3 Narrative
Over the break, I met up with my teammates on Thursday and Friday to finish glueing our arch from last week due to lack of epoxy glue in the workshop. One of my team member bought the epoxy glue for us to use. During the glueing phase, we came across some barriers, that we could not just glue on top of our pre-arranged noodle arch because some of the noodles need to be replaced because there are gaps between the noodles because they broke when moving the arch from school to the house. So, we had to remove the noodle from the fettuccine, throw away the broken piece, put new ones it, and made sure there were no gaps and begin glueing again.

As I finished glueing and waited for it to dry, I decided to test out the strength of the noodle arch by applying some weight to it. I took off my shoe and weight it, it weights about 0.5 lbs. I tied a string to the arch and place my shoe in it, it broke in three different parts. I analyzed why it broke and figured that the noodle arch broke where there was little epoxy glue applied. This meant that the fettuccine just made the arch heavier.

Seeing our first design failed, I continued to brainstorm another design. This design consist of using wires instead of fettuccine, where they did the same function to form the arch, and at the end of the construction I will be removing the wire from the inside of the ziti noodle. I came across a problem that the inside of the ziti noodles would stick into the wires as I glue the ziti noodles together. One of the possible solutions I did was to cut the wires into smaller pieces to easily remove them, but that did not work at all, it was still impossible to remove the wires from the ziti noodles. Another solution, that I made it possible was that wrapping the wire with wax paper, just like wrapping the arch board with wax paper so that the ziti noodles would not sick into the wire and unto the arch board. I began inserting the wire wrapped in wax paper into ziti noodles and will be gluing and testing the strength of the arch next week.



My Fourth task
Create a series of ziti noodle arches with the use of wires inside to form and hold the noodles together and later remove the wires inside and glue the arches together and test its strength.

Summary of actual work over fourth weekend
How is what you did different than what you planned? During the forth week, I helped my team mate build the box to find the best degree to grind the noodle. I also, tested out different ways to built an arch.

Week4 Narrative
Tell a detailed story describing what you did for your team over the weekend. After observing where the arch broke and realizing that the fettuccine noodle did not help support the strength of the arch where it only created more unnecessary weight. I thought instead of inserting wire wrapped in wax paper, I could just tape up the noodles on the arch and glue them. So as I built another bridge where there was nothing inside of it, I taped a bunch of penne noodles on the arch board trying to limit the amount of gaps in between and then begin gluing together the noodles.



During the process of gluing, I had difficultly because as I glue, each noodle would move sideways and will not align together. Some arch will move to the right or left and will misalign from the previous noodle. Also, it created gaps in between the noodles because there wasn't any pressure trying to stick the noodles together, it was lose and each noodle aren't really touching each other. After seeing this failure, I realized I have to really use the wire wrapped in wax paper because wrapping the wire in wax paper and inserting it inside the noodle, it would fill in the hallow space. Filling in the hallowed space would give me more control over the position of the noodle in the arch. The noodles would not easily slide off the wire or slide off to the left or right and make it misaligned. I would also be able to make each noodles touch each other and be able to easily glue them together. The only difficult part was removing the wire off the noodle because they were tightly filled in the hallowed noodle. I had to make small portions of the arch and then later glue them together. I only created one arch, I have to create a series of arches to finish this project.

I also made a tutorial video on how to wrap wax paper onto the wire.

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).