This article was posted 08/03/2006 and is most likely outdated.

An Engineer's Story Problem
 

 
Topic - Unusual and Special Issues
Subject - An Engineer's Story Problem

August 3, 2006  

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An Engineer's Story Problem



 A Backhoe weighing 8 tons is on top of a flatbed trailer and heading east on Interstate 70 near Hays, Kansas. The extended shovel arm is made of hardened refined steel and the approaching overpass is made of commercial-grade concrete, reinforced with 1 ½ inch steel rebar spaced at 6 inch intervals in a criss-cross pattern layered at 1 foot vertical spacing.

Solve:  When the shovel arm hits the overpass, how fast do you have to be going to slice the bridge in half?  (Assume no effect for headwind and no braking by the driver...)

Extra Credit: Solve for the time and distance required for the entire rig to come to a complete stop after hitting the overpass at the speed calculated above.  Yes, you can neglect friction...

Demonstrative Solution: (Doesn't look as though he could get up enough speed to make it all the way...)

 

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Comments

  • Cool. I will have to send this over to Greg May over at Two Sockets Two Meters. He though that Bob Badgers' photo of water gushing out of a meter socket was cool too.

    There are 2 military words for this.

    SNAFU: Situation Naturally All F-worded Up

    FUBAR: Definition 1. F-worded Up Beyond All Repair First used during World War 2 to decribe close encounters of the wrong kind with bullets, land mines, torpedoes, knives, hand grenades and so forth.

    Definition 2: F-worded Up Beyond All Recognition First used during World War 2 to describe what happens to a frequency shift keyed short wave radioteletypewriter signal when the ionosphere is doing the samba.

    I also found a color printer over at Marc's, brand new with USB port and everything else for under $10. Was virtually a steal.

    Mike Cole mc5w at earthlink dot net

    Michael R. Cole
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