Earthquakes are a common occurence around the world, destroying billions of dollars of infrastructure and causing many deaths. This serves a challenge for engineers, as they must make a building that can remain standing when an earthquake occurs. This is the issue we were presented with in our engineering challenge. We were challenged wtiih designing and making a structure, made out of spaghetti and blu-tac, that must fulfil these criteria.
The structure must:
- Survive at least 10 seconds on a table that simulates the movements of an earthquake
- Be under a budget of $60, where one stick of 25cm spaghetti is $1 and 1 gram of blu-tac is $1
- Reach a maximum height of 60cm, with at that top a platform that can support a piece of paper 5cm x 5cm
- The base must not exceed a 30cm x 30cm region
- Be built with only materials supplied by our teacher
An unoffical addition added by our teacher was that the structure would undergo a weight test, where weights of 50 grams would be added to the top until the structure deformed, as in reality, buildings must not only withstand earthquakes, but also support massive weights aswell.
The Engineering Process
The engineering process is a list of steps that engineers use to help develop and test potential solutions to challenges. We used this process to tackle our problem. We defined their problem, then brainstormed ideas to solve the problem. After, we looked to other sources, such as the internet and research solutions. Using the information found, we then designed our prototype, made it and tested it on the shake table. From how our tower survived we can evalute how our tower did, then repeat the process and either, brainstorm, research or design a new prototype. Before we made our prototype we had done a 50 minuite design sprint without any preperation or design. This was beneficial as it allowed us to get a grasp of the task and what to change and make our tower better. It would be better if we also could do another prototype and redesign ours, as it allows us to further improve our tower.