Civil Engineering

Civil engineers design, build, supervise, operate, and maintain construction projects and systems in the public and private sector, including roads, buildings, airports, tunnels, dams, bridges, and systems for water supply and sewage treatment.  Civil engineers generally work in a variety of locations and conditions. Many spend time outdoors at construction sites so that they can monitor operations or solve problems onsite. Most work full time.

Design

The first step in the proccess of creating the bridge was to design it.  The bridge was designed using a software called "Bridge Designer 2016 2nd Editition".  We were able to succesfully design a bridge that was able to sustain the load required (pictured on the right).  We then, using ratios, calculated the dimensions for the bridge and all of its supports.  We knew that this would work beccause the ratio between the emulated load and the emulated bridge is the same as the ratio between the wood used to create the bridge and the three bricks we had to transport.

Rover

We designed a rover which autonomously carries three bricks accross the bridge.  The rover was designed to be very thin which gives more flexibility for the width of the bridge.  Additionally, the rover has a four wheel drive mode so that it is able to turn in place, which again alows for a thin bridge.  The reason behind wanting a thin bridge is derived from the very limited resources given.

Bridge Building

The entire team contributed to the actual building of the bridge.  We worked strenuously in cutting the wood and gluing it, then repeat.  This was a very time consuming proccess and was difficult to balance amongst the other tasks.  We used the calculations made and tthe simulation to design this bridge and then scale down to our size.  The bridge will be very succesful because it has a lot of support and was built well.