The Hangzhou Bay Bridge is a cable stayed bridge in China. Located on the Hangzhou Bay and crossing the Qiantang River and the Yangtze River Delta, it is the longest ocean crossing bridge in the world. Preparatory work and designing of the bridge started in 1994, and construction started in 2003. Construction finished in 2007, but the bridge was not officially open to the public until 2008. The bridge itself cuts transportation time from Ningbo to Shanghai down to two and a half hours, when it would normally take four hours. The estimated total cost for the project is almost $1.5 billion.
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This video primarily focused on various engineering failures. These failures were all relating to materials. There was a lot of emphasis on various ways bridges and raised walkways have collapsed. A lot of the time, the failure occurred because the materials were either not thick enough or not wide enough. When a material is not wide enough, it can cause it to twist very easily. There were a couple different examples of high winds causing suspension bridges to collapse. Also, sometimes bridges are not designed for a very heavy load. When you put too much weight on a bridge, the materials will start buckling, and they will eventually snap. Fatigue happens when a safe amount of stress is applied to an object repeatedly. Eventually, the material will develop a crack, leading to total failure.
Stresses and materials are typically the source of the failure. You need to be able to accurately predict which materials are going to handle the stress best. Different designs are also built to carry different amounts of stress and serve different purposes. Buckling is common in materials that are not flexible or strong. Fatigue can be avoided with regular maintenance of various parts, but engineers must be able to predict which parts should be replaced and how often they should be replaced. Failure is definitely necessary for success because by failing, you learn how your design went wrong. Without failure, we would not be able to imagine all of the different scenarios that could happen. An engineer has to be careful to think of every way a design could go wrong. There is actually no concrete way to prove that everything that could happen has been carefully thought out. It is a lot simpler to disprove that every failure has been prepared for. You could easily point out one way that the design could go wrong. Engineers today have more knowledge and experience than engineers used to. Using past mistakes, we can greatly reduce the number of failures. However, we will still continue to fail. It is very hard to think of a way for engineers to fail in a safe environment. Various concepts are tested quite a bit before the public can use them, but it is still hard to be equipped for every failure. |
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