The Strength of Bridges
The purpose of this research was to find a bridge design that is strong and inexpensive. The reason this experiment was conducted was to find a design that could significantly improve upon current bridge designs to hold up more weight. The researchers built multiples of three different bridge types: beam bridges, truss bridges, and a “crazy bridge” which was custom made design. These bridge designs are relatively simple and cheap designs as compared to suspension bridges. These designs that the researchers tested are all relatively cheap designs as compared to suspension. The researchers then added force to these bridges to see the maximum force it could support before breaking. To see if there was a difference in the mean values for the max strength, an ANOVA test was used. This was found to be true by the p-value of the ANOVA test was lower than the alpha level for deeming something statistically significant. The values for the mean force supported by the beam, truss, and “crazy” bridge are .111, .348, .383 Kp respectively.
Research Done By:
Alexander Gregg
Warren Mott High School
Paul Stabile
Cousino High School
Warren Consolidated Schools