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Home
Team
Photos
2002-03 Season
Steel
Bridge National
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2001-02
Dovetails Testing
Early in the season,
we settled on using slide-together dovetails for the tension connections
between bridge sections. This design allowed for much faster assembly of the
bridge and eliminated the need for structural bolted connections between the
sections (we still had to have one, nonfunctional, bolt per connection as
dictated by the competition rules). Structural analysis revealed that the
dovetails would have to support a tensile load of up to 6.5 kips.
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Our first dovetail
design, shown broken at right, supported only 5.5 kips
before failing.
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Notice how the
dovetail began to fracture at the acute angle where the “claw” attaches to
the rest of the dovetail.
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Our redesigned dovetail
supported 8 kips before the testing machine began to slip and we were
forced to stop. The new design is slightly larger in each dimension and has
drilled holes to eliminate the stress points where the old dovetail
fractured.
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The new dovetail is
visibly deformed following the testing. This type of “bending” failure is much
preferable to a fracture such as occurred in the old design.
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Professor Jansen loads
the new dovetail into the testing machine.
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The dovetail, ready for
loading.
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