Steel Bridge

I'm a member of the Cornell University Steel Bridge Project Team, and we compete in the annual ASCE Steel Bridge Competition. We design, analyze, fabricate, and construct steel bridges like these, every year:

Unlike other teams, our bridges are made entirely in-house. Every piece of steel was machined and welded by our team. This results in a bridge that is uniquely our own.

First years on the team also participate in a Freshman Design Project, where we design a bridge in groups of 5 to competition specifications.

The bridge on the right was designed in MASTAN2, which we use to create structures and perform analysis. The green arrows represent a loading setup from the 2023 Steel Bridge Rules, allowing us to measure the efficacy of our design.

We also designed connections for parts of the bridge and performed static analyses on them to determine if they would survive loading.

After using MASTAN2 to find the forces within the element, we used Fusion360 to model a connection and apply loads to determine the safety factor of our design. One such connection is shown on the left.

A major part of the competition is Construction: building the bridge as fast and as clean as possible

As we can see from the rules, faster time and fewer builders lead to a higher score.

This means that we don't just design our bridges to minimize deflection, but also to preserve "human build-ability." An easy-to-construct bridge might deflect a lot, but an extremely stiff bridge may be impossible to construct.

On the right is our bridge fully deconstructed in preparation for the construction portion of the competition:

Here's more pictures of construction during competition:

I also learned how to machine through Steel Bridge! Here's a small video of me using a lathe:

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