Gauntlet Of Firms

 THE GAUNTLET OF FIRMS

DB 2022 URBAN PLANNING

INTRODUCTION

What's two more pounds? Three? Four? Pressure on pressure, we watch eagerly as our opponent's bridge begins to crack. Thousands and thousands of people's lives on the line of this design, yet the bridge has folded into the shape of a U. Crack. The last line of defense has admitted its defeat as causalities begin to scale tenfold. 

Welcome to Urban Planning, where we're learning about the wonders of engineering. In this case, we've been studying Newton's laws, vectors, and forces. There's a lot that goes into designing the perfect bridge that will hold strong under uncountable circumstances. Luckily for us, we only had to account for if our bridge could hold 10 pounds or more. For this action project, we were tasked with creating a bridge with only 50 popsicle sticks utilizing inspiration from real-life bridge models. This bridge not only had to be practical in its function with a requirement of holding 10 pounds at minimum, needed to specifically be the I-90 highway bridge in Chicago, but also needed to connect to an SDG. Below you'll find the creative process me and my partner underwent to conduct what I like to call the most "honorable" bridge. Enjoy.

THE STRUGGLE OF DESIGN

It was incredibly challenging to think of a design that incorporated something both innovative and effective with a small “budget” (in this case, the capped limit of 50 popsicle sticks). With said budget, it feels like it was a battle over deciding whether or not to lose points for focusing more on practicality or innovative style. It left no space for opportunities to be played with, and every decision felt final. The design was also incredibly hard to make significant, as it’s simply just the crumbling I-90 highway, with no other purpose than to create passage for vehicles.

Me and my partner took two different approaches to our bridge design sketches. She was more optimistic and playful with her design, vouching for a spiraling bridge that goes downward, which sadly couldn’t be met with our current resources at hand. I stressed over practicality and originality. The questions that I kept torturing myself with was how would we design a bridge that was significant to Chicago, significant to an SDG and significant to its respective engineering field?

In doing so, our teacher had strangely (and most likely unintentionally) recreated literally the same scenario from a book called Devil in The White City, where the main character, a Chicago architect named Burnham with his crew of renowned architects from around the United States, were challenged with designing the Chicago World Fair, except me and my partner were put in a drastically smaller time frame and obviously less dramatic consequence if we didn’t hold up to everything expected of us.

Both our group and theirs struggled with the environment we were assigned to work on, seeing more challenges than opportunities. A terrible government that held the creative process hostage (in this case our teacher with our limited budget of only 50 sticks designed for the age range of 3+, and also assigning us the I-90 bridge as mentioned before) and in their case significant delays on communication from the government on approval of their processes, an unstable foundation, and an even worse city to work with.

Our design ended up becoming more optimistic in its flexibility granted by our teacher, allowing for my not-too-sensible idea of making a “stacked” bridge, with an underpass for cars, while the top of the bridge served as a bike path with a hard focus on the scenery holding flora for the cyclists to admire and enjoy for a moment before continuing on their way. This was to encourage biking over automobiles, as cars weren’t permitted on the top of the bridge, therefore not allowed to enjoy the scenery, simply just a glimpse of it.

This of course, wasn’t exactly sensible in the aspect that it’s a highway with no bike path or a reason to include a bike path.

Sketches by D.B / K.H 2022

But we committed to it with a vague idea of what we wanted to design it around, we began looking through Chicago bridges that could support and evolve our design, which we were pleasantly surprised to find that there was a design that sang to our WIP sketch so well. This would be the N. Wells St. Bridge, which supported not only vehicles going underneath, but a train line that ran through the top as well. We didn’t exactly need all the support required to hold the mass of a running train, just enough for occasional bikers.

N. Wells St. Bridge from Chicagoloopbridges.com

  

Which is where we messed up in terms of our final design; ultimately it didn’t really matter too much because then we got bragging rights for our totally intentional design that was just so incredibly honorable. We designed our bridge to provide the support that we should have intended to place where the underpass for the cars were, but accidentally put it where the bikes were. That was a change and error that isn’t too much of a regret in all honesty, as it ended up showing the true pros and cons of our design with no crutches to hold more weight than it was supposed to.

 As for the STG criteria, "Sustainable development goal 11", which is sustainable cities and communities that aims to “make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable.” This goal addresses the current issues with communities regarding their infrastructure deterioration, affordability, and access to basic needs. The design of the bridge we created focused on resilience and safety with the structure attached to the bottom chord meant to mimic the N. Wells St. Bridge, which has held up for some time. 

My last critique of our design was our need to invest more support in the ends of the bridge, as I feel that stressed our bridge’s stability the most. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have done it any differently since it accomplished its required weight and even a little more.

THAT'S A LOT OF MATH SECTION

Now time for the mathematics. We're going to be looking at calculations we've made for the bridge using measurements made on the popsicle sticks, which are going to be used to find the angle of the triangles formed by the ends of the bottom chords. Below you'll first find the dissected anatomy of our bridge, labeling all the specifics of our bridge's structure. The first picture is simply just using the terms that engineers use to describe parts of the bridge, past that it doesn't really hold any mathematical value. 

Bridge by DB

Bridge by D.B 

This one on the other hand is compression and tension. To quote my notes on an explanation of the difference between compression and tension: "Tension refers to forces that attempt to elongate a body, whereas compression refers to forces that attempt to shorten the body." 

Below this is our run-of-the-mill SOHCAHTOA. We're dealing with angles, Pythagorean theorem and laws of sin, cos, and tan. For our measurements, we used inches. A singular popsicle stick is 4.5 inches, the entire length of the bottom chord of the bridge is 18 inches, width of the bridge was 4.5 as well and the height of the bridge is 4.5 (excluding the sticks that are poking out, as they don't really serve much of a purpose.) Below you'll find the rundown of our process step by step.

Pythagorean Theorem by K.H 2022

Law of Sin by K.H 2022

Law of Cos by K.H 2022

Next up, we had to calculate three more things: velocity, kinetic and potential energy. The law of conservation of energy tells us that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, it merely changes form. Let's see that law applied with our bridge. 

Potential - 

mass x gravity x height

5.8kg x 9.8m/s/s x 0.889m = 503.7 J

Velocity -

9.8m/s/s downward

Kinetic - 

½ (mass)(velocity)^2

½ (5.8kg)(9.8m/s)^2

(2.9)(96.04) = J

We can see that it takes more energy for the bridge to stay in place than to be actively falling. Interesting. 

Conclusion

This project was honestly stressful and painful for the first day and a half, as me and my partner struggled to actually work as partners for the design period. It made work hard to do when we were hesitant on committing to anything, along with our stubborn nature creating pointless competition between the two of us. It was a headache. Eventually we finally linked and settled on a plan. I wish we had more sticks to work with, but I understand they weren't exactly provided by the school. I believe next time, even by bumping up the sticks to 75 each, would allow for a lot more creative expression for students. Sure it's a challenge to see if students can apply the lessons learned to create something practical, but I'm confident that with 75 it allows for both practicality and flexible room for innovation. Those are my final thoughts on it, and I hope you enjoyed this action project.