Fernbank Project: Strongest Bridge Design

I built this bridge for the 2005 Fernbank Science Center bridge design event. This is the strongest bridge I have ever built. The bridge spanned 16 inches, weighed 37 grams, and held 346 pounds. That puts its efficiency over 4200! I had never even come close to getting this amount of strength out of a bridge design before. I was really surprised. One person said, “So if this bridge weighed one pound, it could have held up my car.”

The first time the bridge was tested it did not break. The testing machine was set to only apply 250 pounds. This bridge was too strong for that! Here is the bridge after the second testing:

The secret of a strong bridge design

As you can see, the bridge stayed mostly intact. I talked to a couple engineers at the event and asked them what they thought made my bridge break. One suggested that the bridge failed in torsion, as I did not have any diagonal braces in the bridge. That is definitely a design flaw I will fix if I do this again. I would love to try and break an efficiency of 5000. That would be a strong bridge indeed!

For more information on this competition, see Atlanta Toothpick Bridge Competition. I encourage anyone in the Atlanta area to try and go to this event. It is free and open to all, both young and old. Try your hand at making the strongest bridge. And when you do, send me photos of your bridge 🙂

80 thoughts on “Fernbank Project: Strongest Bridge Design”

  1. yeah this site is awesome i am a Yr7 and it has helped me soo much with my maths assessment for the strongest and longest bridge

    Reply
  2. This website is so helpful for my daughter.She is in 7 th grade and she is doing a science experiments on what type of bridge holds up the most weight. So on this website she is learning what types of bridges there are and what they look like. Thank you so very much!!🙂

    Reply

Leave a Reply to Garrett Boon Cancel reply