The smallest beam size made can fail under it's own weight.
What our attempt to do was create a beam that would fail no matter what you did. The length did not matter. We just wanted it to fail. We were really bored.
I think that one is like dividing by 0, or something similar. If there isn't a span, there isn't a moment or a shear....or any mass for that matter.
The whole thing started from me making an off hand comment in class. All I asked was could you design a beam so heavy that it cannot support itself? The answer was yes, but why would you?
I saw that they are making emergency repairs. Since that beam was in tension, how do you re-tension it? The world's largest come-along?
You don't. If there was a huge gap, which then caused a huge sag in the bridge, they might try to figure out a way to lift the bridge before doing the repairs. None of that seems to be the case, so I imagine they'll just replace the tensile capacity that was lost.
It's weird that that had occurred to me also. Why didn't the bolts just start ripping out or tearing their holes?
They probably just overlaid them with more in the emergency repair. It's interesting that the parting was right next to the plate...
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It seems like they would have called the Tennessee Highway Patrol. I'm surprised the people at 911 knew what to do. They had to be thinking "you want me to do what?"SIAP:
LISTEN: Inspectors report ‘critical find’ in 911 calls to Memphis police, ask for immediate shutdown of I-40 bridge
The City of Memphis released the 911 calls bridge inspectors made after finding a fractured beam in the middle of the I-40 bridge Tuesday.
Do you know the THP number off the top of your head? Everyone knows 911. They needed people off the bridge ASAP.
I don't know it off the top of my head but had it within 20 seconds of a Google search.
Possibly, but it depends on how deep that girder is. It's really hard to do that with a closed section like that. When you design the connection, you check tension on the net section (area with holes removed). That's basic stuff. Since that is probably a built up plate section that's much deeper that it appears in the photo, it could certainly have doubler plates on the connection. When you do that though, you get a stress riser where the doubler terminates.....maybe that fracture is where the doubler terminates.
The splice plate doesn't matter on this issue. It's a net area of the base material
We were talking about this internally at our office. We were all saying that's a tough call to make, both as tough decision and physically making the call. They made the correct call calling 911. To almost anyone, seeing that fracture means it looks like imminent collapse. You don't call a bureaucracy like a highway department. You call the people with the authority to immediately put up barriers.
