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Bridge Designer Tutorial
I was first introduced to the Bridge Designer by a civil engineer, who explained to me the usefulness of the free program. However, it took me, a 6th grader at the time, over a year of playing around with it to finally figure it out. I know some people with an online game design degree that still have trouble with it, but for the most part it’s a very useful program that most can grasp easily.
The Bridge Designer allows you to create a virtual truss, put a load on it, and see how the load is spread out. It is very useful to use after you test a bridge to failure, then plug in the bridge design, and see how much force it took to break it.
Here is a text version of the video. When you first load the program, you are presented with this:
To begin, you will need to click the “Add Nodes” button. A “node” is simply a joint. You must add the joints before adding the actual members.
Usually, I start with the bottom left corner of the bridge, and then count over to the right however many squares as my bridge is long. I count one square per inch. If your bridge is really short, you might do two squares per inch. Or if it is really long, 1/2 square per inch.
After I have the bottom length, I add the top nodes. It might look something like this:
Now it is time to add the members. Click the “Add Members” button. Left click on one of the nodes you have added, and drag the mouse over to the next one. You must hold down the left button to do this. It doesn’t matter what order you add the members, but you must connect every node.
After adding all the members, click the “Calculate” button on the bottom. Now look just below the top buttons. In red, you should see something like “There must be one fixed and one roller node”. If you see “Members +3 must equal twice the Nodes”, you need to adjust either the number of nodes or members.
Once everything is okay, click the “Fixed node” button which is one the bottom left. Then click the bottom left node. That node should turn yellow. Make the bottom right node the “Horizontal rolling node”, it should turn red.
Alright, you’re almost done. Click the “Add a Load” button, and choose which node to put it on. You can add more than one load if you want. Once you click that node, Pull your mouse straight down. You should see a number right next to the load increase as you go farther down. Once the load is correct, click once. If you mess up, don’t worry. You easily remove any load, member or node using the buttons.
Now click the “Calculate” button again, and also click anyway on the grid. If everything is set up right, the members should change colors to red, blue, and sometimes green.
You might get the message, “Cannot compute, matrix is singular”. If you do, then somewhere a member might be missing. You need to create triangles for this program to work correctly. If it doesn’t think that your design is “safe”, it won’t work.
Occasionally the program thinks I have an extra node somewhere, and the only fix is to clear everything and start over. Don’t worry, with time you will get the hang of it and create designs in just a few minutes.
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Post Tags: bridge designer, truss, video tutorial
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Warning!!! The bridge designer only suitable for advance users for reference, as it is not suitable for calculating bridges with more than 1 layer of triangles. For those type of bridges top and bottom part has to be separated and calculated separately and added up using cross sectional method.
The designer supports only point loads, when it comes to distributed load, often there will be different point loads for different number of supports rather than only 1 point load. Without these knowledge the designer will give wrong values.
this link will not work does anyone know of any other places where i can try it?
Thank you KianWah Lee that is some very useful information for us all to use. I myself was having a problem with bd as well and you gave a possible solution.
Nice wwebsite
i suppose it is but i cant get to install it…:(
Hi people, may I ask you for little help? It’s about some project for bridge of 25m wich would help me to go beyond the river, and faster arive to field…That bridge would be 25m long and 1.5-2m wide…Can you help me with that project?? Please answer me….
Milos Stanojevic…:-)
Bridger Designer link won’t work. It kicks me off Internet Explorer, then restarts IE. I have Windows Vista.
B Tex, do you have Java installed on your computer? The Bridger Designer application requires java to work.
Yes, JAVA is installed. When I went to I.E., Tools, Internet Options, Advanced, it showed check mark under Java. But when I sent to I.E., Tools, and selected Sun Java Console, it shutdown and restarted I.E.
Hmm, I am not sure what the problem is. Are you able to try it on a different computer?
[...] http://www.garrettsbridges.com/design/bridgedesigner [...]
nooo!… bridge designer link wont work… and i have java installed… pls help
I cant save or print the bridge designer image…got any tips?
Try using print screen–>
Press Alt and Print Screen, then open up Paint and click Edit…Paste.
Please help!!!
the bridge designer cannot open- the page comes up blank. what should I do? is there anytiing I should download????
Mariya, you need to have java installed on your computer.
Can never get pst the +3 members thing…
What exactly do the numbers represent? You would think that if you applied a load of 50, the numbers would show how much of that weight each member was under. For example: in a 7 member bridge, 4 members would say 5, and the other 3 would say 10. It does not do that. What do the numbers mean???
Andrew,
The numbers represent how much force is applied to each member. These numbers do not add up to the total load, they will usually be much more. It is also possible for a single member to have more force than the total load, although that does not often happen in model bridge designs.
It doesnt work properly. I copied a truss off my textbook and it doesnt calculate it. I have 11 memebers yet it thinks I have 7…iuno why.