Earthquakes are natural disasters that happen in our planet and cause tragedy and death to people and structures. Designing an earthquake-resistant structure that can survive the enormous vertical and lateral pressures produced by an earthquake has been a challenge for experts for a long time. Surface waves and P waves (principal) are the seismic waves that cause the most damage. In contrast to surface waves, which produce rolling forces like an ocean wave, P waves produce lateral forces. In science this term, we have been challenged to make a spaghetti tower that will withstand an earthquake and is over 60 cm tall using spaghetti and bluetack. We must follow the costs of $1 for 10 cm of spaghetti and $1 for 1 gram of bluetack. The project was flexible, which really put our ability to work in a team and solve problems to the test, just like an average engineer.
Engineering Process
We first started by doing a quick design sprint and building a tower with whatever design came to our mind. We soon found out that our design wasn’t holding well and collapsed within seconds of testing. Even though this was heartbreaking we learnt a lot about what we couldn’t do and what we could do. In the next lesson we went back and spent some time researching potential designs and reinforcement strategies. Next we tested our research and chose the main parts which helped us a lot and seemed to be of good use. We landed on our design of using triangles for the middle base and using the double reinforcement strategy to make certain that our structure didn’t collapse.
Brainstorm
Above is a picture of our brainstorm which included some of our first ideas when we thought of this project. We made this brainstorm before our first test in the design sprint phase of the whole project and looking back on it, this really helped us now. We were able to see where we were coming from and some ideas we could go back to if others didn’t hold up to par.
Research
This was the idea that we used in the end but instead of the faces being squares we made them triangles.
Cross Bracing
We found that this option was very time-consuming and required a lot of precision to carefully put the blue tack on the pasta and repeat it over again.
Weight Distribution
People make compact areas and then open areas throughout buildings with supports around it called load paths which take brunt of the impact and then is absorbed by reinforcements. Weight distribution is important especially when making this as pasta is very fragile and even with the slightest load it will crumble so distributing the weight into the right places and adding supports in the right places to maximize the height and the sturdiness of the overall structure is key. We do not want to break the budget by just supporting the building so making the structure of the building based of a sturdy foundations is essential as it determines where the centre of gravity is and whether one side has more pressure or not.
Our Design
The picture on the right was our first design and saw many improvements over the next few days. Our base was the structure of our design and we had to invest a lot of blue tack and spaghetti into it. We also ran into a lot of problems and things we needed to change around which I will address later.
Improvements
The main improvement that we made was adding support sticks in the middle of our base as we noticed the base flexing a lot. Because we added these support beams the flexing of the base stopped and the tower was no longer in danger of suddenly breaking. We also added some more stability to the top 5×5 platform as we felt that it was going to fall off or break. Something else that we noticed was that over the duration of building and testing our structure we noticed that the pasta was getting old and cracking. If the whole tower would have broken when we were testing it in front of the entire class we would lose the challenge. We ended up changing the pieces of spaghetti that looked as if they would have broken. The final change that we made was removing some of the bluetack as we felt that we didn’t need it and increased the height of the tower to get more special points for the tallest tower. The improvements definitely helped and too a lot of stress off of our chests as we were worried of the base snapping while in the earthquake test.
Problems we faced
One of the main problems that I think other groups faced during the span of this project was collaborating as a team to an extent. I think that we actually collaborated quite well, although there were some times when we would get on each other’s nerves. We evenly distributed the workload by allocating positions to people in our team. For example, I was the Project Manager (makes sure that everyone understands the challenge and keeps the team on track), Seth was the Equipment Manager (makes sure that the materials needed for the task are available and that everyone cleans up after each session), Mayeul was the Speaker (seeks help from the teacher, other class members or outside experts) and Charlie was the Reporter (makes sure that the final presentation is ready by the deadline). Using this method we were able to plow through the project and have fun at the same time.
Conclusion
In conclusion, this project was really fun for all of us and we ended up spending $60 in total ($47 for spaghetti and $13 for blue tack). I think that we used our time well and we didn’t fall behind in any of our lessons. I would definitely recommend this project to anyone who is looking for a challenge and having some fun with friends.