Halloween Mtg. & 11/4 Analysis

10/31

Happy Halloween everybody!

Real quickly today we talked about two truss designs we're going to analyze this Saturday before the Aggies take on North Dakota State at the Toom. They're primarily built for speed, and have a LOT of construction options on them, as well as a stellar structural profile. If they analyze well, we may very well have finished our truss analysis for the season. Kickoff for the game is 1:05 p.m. local.

Open bay beams will be analyzed in conjunction with the structural optimization class (ECI 153) on campus. Chosen for their relative simplicity (and absolute boringness), the class should be able to spit some numbers back at us, that we more or less already know. The key to the beams functioning structurally, as with any design, but moreso on beams, is their connection solidarity. They may even have to be structurally bolted to work well, dovetails may leave too much play. Then there's the idea of multiple beam-type bridges.

So...this Saturday, 11/4, at 9:30 a.m. we'll meet in the Chrome Ollie Loft in 1203 Bainer Hall, then trek over to EUIII on the 3rd floor student labs where we will input AutoCAD wireframes in SAP 2000 and analyze those two truss designs with the section sizes we think we can get our hands on in 4130 alloy. We may have to hit up the mother supplier in Dillsburg to find what we need and/or want. i.e. wide/thin-wall material. The SAP procedure is pretty simple, it's step by step, and the more you do it the more you'll see how easy it is.

Jessica will work on OT collars soon. They're pretty basic lathe stuff, nothing fancy, but we need to get tolerances down to acceptable levels now, so it won't stall us this winter.

Okay then, time to start charging ahead, let's continue to think and be creative, we have a lot to decide on in the next 5 weeks...