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The University of Nevada at Reno (UNR) is carrying out a large-scale shake-table testing of a four-span bridge, at the UNR Earthquake Engineering Laboratory, on 15 June, 2010 at 10:00 Pacific Time, (18:00 UTC). In itself this is an incredible endevour, but the best thing is that they are webcasting the event live.

For details of the bridge and the test set-up, see here:
http://nees.unr.edu/4-spanbridges/UNR Web AnnouncementCompositeBridge.pdf

and the link for the webcast is:
http://nees.unr.edu/projects/4span.html

Four Span Bridge Test

I was delighted to see that the West Point Bridge Designer program has been updated and the competition is still being run. It really makes bridge design fun! The main website is here: West Point Bridge Design Contest.

The program is the main point of interst though. For your design, it animates in real time the stresses and member failures that occur as chosen loads traverse your bridge. The graphics are cool and there isn’t too much by way of technical input data required. Prepare to lose some hours playing this though!

West Point Bridge Designer 2010

A funny bridge design is here:

In a revival of a department tradition, this year’s final year students organised a class trip to see some world class structures in Munich, Germany. In a futile attempt to prove that we’re still young, three intrepid lecturers accompanied the class, of which I was one. Since I’m writing this, you know the ending: we survived! In an incredible show of restraint, the students resisted the urge to bury us in snow (it was -6 to -9 C), or otherwise leave us in Munich. Thanks!

Joking aside though, we visited three incredible structures/displays. The first was BMW Welt, which is a hugely architecture-driven structure with an amazing floating walkway through the space. BMW Welt is worth the visit just for the displays of automotive technology. Even though we’re not mechanical engineers, I think the basic engineering of complex systems still appealed to us.

BMW Welt

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Some of us knew it already, but now there’s proof!

Produced by Arup for the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers 2009 Presidential Address.