Civil Engineering: Bridge Design

As a final project for CIV102, I designed a 1.2m long bridge out of matboard.

Our bridge is the first yellow one!

To iterate on our design, it was necessary to simulate the bridge performance given different loading conditions and solve for the stress at each point along the bridge for each train position.

I wrote a script in MATLAB to solve for the failure loads of each bridge given the material properties, geometry, and the given SFD and BMDs. This allowed us to identify the failure mode and make design changes according to the relevant equations. For example, adding more layers of matboard on the top reduced the bending stress.

You can read about our design decisions in our report.