Journal_02

CONSTRUCTING ENVIRONMENTS ENVS10003 JOURNAL EMMA BUNN

Week 1 2nd August 2013 COMPRESSION: A force that tends to shorten or squeeze something, decreasing its volume OR the degree to which a substance has decreased in size (in volume, length, or some other dimension) after being or while being subject to stress.

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ANALYSIS- Due to the shape of the small wooden block this limited the flexibility we had in a design process. We decided to follow a simple but effective design process by creating a 3 walled structure with a roof. After completing this we tested out the strength of the structure by placing a water bottle on top of the roof. The structure withheld the weight of the water bottle but was starting to cave in from the centre of the roof outwards, creating the walls to angle in order to support the roofing. To allow for more weight to be added we decided to strengthen the structure by adding another layer so that the compression level in the structure would increase compacting the materials therefore resulting in the shortening of the wood allowing for the weight load being held to also increase.

LOAD PATHS- Until the second layer of the structure was added the structure started to collapse in the centre of the roof due to the both the left and right wall angling in to support the weight on the roof. With the addition of the second layer of walls the weight load was able to increase due to the increase in compression evident in the structure, therefore spreading out the total weight load of water bottle more effectively.

load path spread evenly over the 3 walls and roof.

EFFICIENCY OF THE MATERIAL-WOODEN BLOCKS: Although wood is a common building material due to its extensive availability and ease of fabrication for this activity the efficiency of flexibility in the small wooden blocks we were given to use meant that the and shape of structural designs were limited without the use of other materials such as glue or rubber bands, which also effects the maximum level of compression able to be reached.

Examples of construction concepts by fellow class members:

Week 2 9th August 2013 FRAME: a stable construction of vertical structural members of which interior and exterior wall coverings are attached, and covered by a roof made of horizontal ceiling joists and sloping rafters (or pre-fabricated roof trusses).

1: development of the frame

2: additions to the frame

3: structure completed

ANALYSIS: After cutting our 40x10cm piece of bulsa wood into 40 without much throught into how we were going to outplay the strucutal design, we found that in order to get the heigt we needed our stripes of Bulsa wood were required to be of greater length. We made the decsion to split each piece of bulsa wood width way and glue them together length way in order to have 40 longer pieces of Bulsa wood. This then altered the load path making it weaker than if it were to be one complete piece of bulsa wood.

We chose to use a trianglar frame as it was best suited to evenly spread the load and was subject only to axial tension or compression. After creating the base frame we built upwards following the same framing adding in pieces of bulsa wood to create tension and act as a support for the load to increase and follow the frame up another level before reaching a peak.

LOAD PATHS: The load in which this structure is best described by, is that of a Static Load. Due to the structure increasing the number of bulsa wood pieces (the load) slowly until it reached the peak value of static force which in the case of this structure was after all 40 pieces of Bulsa wood had been added to the structure and the pieces were starting to fold due to weight loads being unsupported which is a result of creating a frame that was not able to hold the compete weight of the structure as not enough compression or tension was evident.

EFFICENCY OF BULSA WOOD: Making the decsion to split our 40 pieces of bulsa wood in order to make them have a greater length meant that they were a thin and weak structure that could not hold much weight. Bulsa wood is a material that when included as part of a structural design can be strong as long as the inital framing can withhold the overall structure through being strong and compressed.

Examples of construction concepts by fellow class members: