Building Bridges: Students in "Solid Mechanics" Test their Designs

Each of the seven bridge teams in last fall's core engineering course used SolidWorks to analyze the maximum load their design could support as well as how far the bridge roadway will bend—without breaking—at a load of 1 kilanewton (kN). At the end of the term, students—with support from MShop Instructor Joe Poissant and Couch Project Lab Manager Daniel Cullen—laser cut and glued together the various plywood parts for models they calculated would carry pedestrians and small vehicles over a river. Then the big day: Couch Lab's Instron machine put their predictions to the test. Crowding into the lab, team members and fellow students cheered as each prototype passed the 1-kN minimum load requirement and even the 4-kN mark before yielding to the crush of the Instron machine.

"Since I took over the course in 2020, I've seen clear improvements in design quality as we've learned from past challenges," says Li, who provided feedback after each test to encourage students to learn from their models' failures. "At some point, we plan to compile past designs and apply machine learning to explore further optimization possibilities. I'm curious to see if future students can outperform machine learning!"