Week 8 Progress (10/26/16)

This week, we have mainly been preparing for our presentation. Here is the breakdown so far for the presentation who-will-do-what:

Theoretical/Analysis

• Kathlyn - thermal analysis, expansion joint gap, properties of strong steel
• Kevin - loading for column and beam
• Isaac - ANSYS analysis for loads?

Project Schedule and Deliverables

• Winter

For Project/Problem Status and Initial Designs/Comparisons of Alternatives, we will all work on this, though Winter and Claude will input more information.

Finally, thanks to Dr. Furman's instructions to the IT guys, the laser cutter on campus finally works. We were able to cut out our rapid prototype (thanks to all of Claude's work) and we will hopefully assemble it before the presentation, which might be tomorrow.

Pieces of our rapid prototype, not yet assembled

Furthermore, since we've lost some sense of direction due to all of the unknown variables, we are working on changing the scope of our group. From full-scale, hopefully we will be able to just focus on columns, beams, and footings, analyzing materials and joining processes. We are focusing more on the structural aspect of Spartan Superway at this point, so our models will probably need to be closer to 1/12 scale to be reasonable for our group. We plan on using MDF for our end-of-semester prototype, and high-strength steel for next semester.