Earthquake Resistance Project

This project was about making a structure out of spaghetti that would stand the force of an earthquake. The rules of this was that it had to have a minimum height of 60cm, has a maximum base of 30cm x 30cm. The structure also had to have a platform at the top above 60cm that would hold something steadily. The structure had to stand the earthquake for at least 10 seconds. The project had to cost a theoretical $60, Blu Tack was $1 (per gram) and each spaghetti piece was $1 (per every 10cm length). First we needed to select what part in the team each person would have. We had four people in the team Tim, Eleanor, Miah and I. I was the equipment manager, Tim was the speaker, Eleanor was the project manager and Miah was the reporter. Next we had to decide what design we would use to model our structure off of. The picture that you can see here was our first thought of what we could base our tower off. Next we needed to build it to test see if we could actually build it and also if we had enough resources for it. Once we had tried to build it we realized that there was not going to be enough recourses to build it. So we shut it down and moved on to our next thought/design. The teacher also gave us some advice the first part of advice was to make it less complex because it doesn’t always have to look good to work efficiently also we needed to make sure that we had a platform that was above 60cm. We took these suggestion into consideration for our next build.

After trying to build our first idea and realising the resources an time was not available to build it we decided to change our idea completely. We still wanted to use the idea of squares and triangles but the next structure was going to be alot more basic and it would use less resources. This design had a cubed shaped lower part and all the supports would have mini supports to help stabilise the structure, on the top of the cube was a triangle that would be there to make the building 60cm. After we started to build this structure we decided to modify the building to add four mini triangles on the outside and to add the supports there instead of connecting them to the main cube, but we did decide to keep the triangle on top because we thought that that part of it would not change anything. After changing it we tested this test design on the earthquake making machine and we had just a couple notes that come from the teacher. These notes were that it needs to get bigger so that it reaches the 60cm height limit, also we needed to add a spot to hold the platform that would be used to hold the weight. So to do that we decided to add an extra cube layer on the top of the first one so that it would get above the 60cm limit and then after that we would put a place on top for that platform that would hold the weight and also hold the weight at the same time.

For our last test we decided to combine the first and the second structures together to make this final product. This structure reached the height minimum of 60cm and held the platform above 60cm. This one was not built as well as the others were because we had to build it on the day and we only had around 45mins to do. This also was a design that we had just come up with. At the time of the test we put it on the earthquake maker and it was going well until the board fell off the base and the whole structure broke from going under the base so our structure was ruined beyond repair meaning we will never know if it was actually going to stand the time or not.

Conclusion

This project was a fun project and was a great opportunity to work as a team. Through this project our team worked ok together but some times one or two of our team members were led away by a distraction but we managed to keep it together. I think our group worked together the best because we had some of the best joint skills out of all the group. This means that each of us could do something the others couldn’t do. Our group communicated very well during this whole project there was little to no arguments and if one of us did get annoyed or angry at building the tower then we would give them time and they would come back happy.