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Water Tower
January / February 2017
Group Project with Lidia Dynes-Martinez, Keshav Jagan and Ian Kegler
Goal
Design a water tower with minimal mass and maximum strength
Contribution
Every team member generated several designs and tested them using Solidworks FEA software. It was found that my design had the best strength to weight ratio and was therefore selected as the final structure.
Execution
The water tower was designed using the material properties of Bucatini pasta (a round hollow shape pasta, like a pipe). We then built the tower itself out of Bucatini and tested it to see whether our predicted buckling load and compressive strength were correct.
Ideation
Iteration
The final 2 iterations were very similar; these consisted of stacked layers of either pentagons or squares. It was found that the squares were superior overall due to the lower mass.
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