SPAGHETTI BRIDGE
Every year at UTS the new Civil Engineering students are given the opportunity to show their talents with the Spaghetti Bridge building competition. I took part in 2007.
This was, in my opinion, the most enjoyable assignment I have been asked to do at uni as it required the employment of mental and practical abilities (as far as building with spaghetti can be considered practical). We were given a demonstration of the properties of spaghetti in tension and compression - as one would expect the shape of this type of pasta lends great susceptibility to buckling. Thus my design focused on tension members, that is, to the best of my abilities at the time, I have since thought of many designs I would consider much more appropriate, but that is what comes of doing the relevant subjects
As you can see, there was a great variety in design. Some people seemed quite adept at pasta based construction
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| Self weight: 189.7 |
And the result of testing: Almost 19 times self-weight, not bad for spaghetti!
t |
| Load at failure: 3559.5g |
