Our team went on a site visit on October 5 to learn more about about the current Grays Ferry Bridge and the ongoing pedestrian bridge replacement project. We met with Lane Fike, PE ; the Director of Capitol Programs at SRDC, Joseph Syrnick; President and CEO of SRDC, and Joseph Sullivan of Louis Berger. We discussed the existing bridge and its mechanical and structural attributes, as well as the designs for the replacement pedestrian bridge. We also discussed realistic constraints such as the historic eligibility of the bridge and the necessity of the bridge to be a movable one. We compared some of the AASHTO standards and recommendations, such as pedestrian and vehicle loading, to their ideas and were able to determine what type of constraints and abilities the bridge should have.

Since our last progress report, we have begun determining the amount of live loading that our bridge will experience for our preliminary design. We have also begun designing the truss and decking system to determine the total dead load of the bridge. This dead load will be used for calculations for our first design of the mechanical equipment. We have also created a preliminary model on Solidworks that serves to only show the layout of how the mechanical parts will work together and how they will attach to the span.

Scholarly articles and case studies for vibrational analysis for truss swing bridges have been studied and one has been chosen to be duplicated. The article chosen is “HUMAN COMFORT ANALYSIS AND VIBRATION CONTROL OF A STEEL-CONCRETE COMPOSITE FOOTBRIDGE” written by Joesley P. Mendes , José Guilherme S. da Silva and Wendell D. Varela. It is an analysis of the kinds of vibration and modes of vibration that a pedestrian truss bridge experiences. We will be copying their study and matching their results. Once the end conditions and modes of vibration are verified, we can build upon the geometry to create our specific bridge design.