I packed last friday night (Bloody Hell, almost a week ago) and then left saturday morning. In the end I ended up going a night earlier as Dad had tickets for The Eagles gig at the MEN on sunday night and couldn’t take me. Anyway going off topic. We left saturday and got down in a couple of hours and first visited my grandparents and had tea there. Around 7:30 parents left and then my uncle came and picked me up around 9 o’clock. I slept on saturday night and then my uncle dropped me off at halls at around 3 on sunday afternoon.

I registered and got my key and went up to my room and started to unpack then went back downstairs outside as people started to congregate and introduce each other. It was then a 20 minute walk to go and get tea at Shackleton hall which was quite nice but I was at the back of the queue so must have been waiting for close on an hour to get food. The food wasn’t bad though and the chicken was nice and tender however it meant that all the bones kept falling off and I kept eating them. With dinner finished we headed back to the civil engineering.
That evening we had a design and build competion. We had to build a bridge that spanned 1.2m and could hold at least 5N 350mm above the height of the table, made out of only paper. The only problem was that the bridge had to fail at 50N and so we set about designing a truss bridge. Our main idea was a truss bridge made of triangles and to raise it up high enough we planned a second layer of triangles. That was the plan and tbh it didn’t really work. With making it out of paper it meant that the holes for the bolts weren’t at exactly the same length each time which left some members a few milimeters too short and it pulled in all the members. When designing it we also forgot to think how we were going to attach both trusses together and in the end we just sort of put a few members on the bottom and added other ones to weak parts of the structure that need it. In the end though the bridge held 11N and we weren’t last. We then went back to halls and quite a few watched Jackass in S5 common room. Then bed and the end of a good day.

Monday morning we started work with a lab session. The first one I was in was looking at velocity of water and hydraulic radius trying to find manning’s constant, n, in the formula Q = (A/n)(R^2/3)(?Sf). You can look here if you are interested. The afternoon was then used to start putting together concepts for our main bridge. The brief was for a pair of bridges that would help move visitors between stratford international station and the main stadium. They had to be 50m wide which would reduce to 6m after the games and span 45 and 30m over 2 rivers with a bit of land in between. We started throwing a few concepts around and came up with a bridge that would have a central 6m bit which would be used by cyclists and then there would be an extra 22m either side that would be used by pedestrians.

Monday night we went bowling which was really funny. I won’t recall a lot of it to save embarassment for people but I will say that I was shockingly poor the first game and was quite good the second game, managed 2 strikes in a row and got 4 strikes total, I was quite happy.

Tuesday started off with more lab work looking at structures and how beams are made in I shape. It is to do with the axis of bending.

The x axis/plane runs down the centre of the beam through your eyes and in the other direction and this is known as the axis of bending. Then the I shape is used to provide strength. The shape arised out of using a rectangular beam with a shorter x axis and longer y axis however it is found that it is only the extremities on the y axis that provide the most strength so materials are removed round the parts where it is not effective and just adding weigh round the centre near the axis of bending.

The final lab work was looking at the height of the water above the weir. By using the height of the weir and the velocity of the water the height of the water above the weir can be calculated. This was needed as the bridge was not allowed to flood in a 1 in 100 year flood of 200m^3/sec.

With the lab work done we set about looking at the concepts and deciding what was feasible to design and then eventually to build. Lots of designs were put forward and in the end we settled on a design with 2 steel sprung arches supporting a central 6m walkway that during the games would be used as a cycle way. There would also be 22m spans eitherside supported by suspension/cable stay sort of thing, these would then be used as walkways during the games and could easily dismantled after the games like the brief specified.

On Wednesday morning we went on a site visit and the group I was in went to ronald mcdonald’s childrens house. The building was being built for families to stay in who’s children were in the childrens hospital over the road. The visit was really eye opening and you can look at some pictures here.

As the week progressed we built up our designs on sketchup and in the end, culminated in doing a presentation to the client on the Thursday. This is when it sort of started falling apart. Earlier in the week we were told that the lecture theature had google sketchup and so were planning on doing out presentation then showing the client round our design using sketchup however when we got into the theature we found that we didn’t have google sketchup and another thing I’d that we had sort of done both designs of the bridge, the one of the sprung arches and the one of the suspension detachable sides in random and didn’t have one overall dewing thatincluded both of them. As a result our presentation wasn’t that slick and we left the client confused as to what our bridge would look like.

Even so it was a very good week and I made lots of friends. Lessons were learnt and I would do quite a few things differently if I was to do it again but it was still good all the same and confirms that I want to do civil engineering at university.

But overall it was a very good day. Really good SU and it now makes my university decision harder.

We got the train to sheffield in the morning as mum didn’t feel like driving and didn’t want to be tired in the evening driving home. The train left warrington central at 8:13 and pulled into sheffield around 9:35, got off the train and went to the main entrance knowing that we needed to get the tram to sheffield uni and that was where we hit a problem, there were no students at the station telling people that they need to go the the tram stop on the other side of the station and also what side platform to be on so we follow the signs to the tram stop and I work out what side we need to be on and then get on a tram to sheffield uni. The tram system is actually pretty decent and seems to connect quite a few places and doesn’t seem to be as big as manchester. In Manc you can feel when a tram is coming cos they are so big but the trams in sheffield were quite quiet and smooth. Once we get to the Uni tram stop (Yes the uni has it’s own tram stop), there are plenty of people pointing the way and someone points us towards all the talks in firth Hall.

First up was the accomodation talk which we decided to go to as we missed the welcome to sheffield talk. (From what my friend said that it was a good uni/city just not put across well (Read His blog >> Florx Blog) ) Got in there and the woman delivering it was just boring, the accomodation looks really good just not put across in an engaging and lively way. I was stood up as there was no room but mum was sat down and I think at one point she fell asleep . Then there was the student life presentation which was slightly better. But there is a rule in presenting to never read from the sheet which it seemed that they did quite a bit. But even so it was an ok talk. We came out of that and went back under the road to outside the SU. From there we booked on a tour of the campus which we did. It is very impressive with a massive modern library and a really good SU. From the atmosphere in the couple of bars in the SU, it just feels a bit more mature than the nightclub in Cardiff’s SU.

In the afternoon we then wandered down to the civil engineering talk and tour which was really impressive. Firstly there was a talk by one of the lecturers which I suppose could have and was give at any uni that we have been to but even so I listened and then we had a tour of the research labs. Firstly there was an erasmus student called andrea who was studying flooding and how stuff can be done to contain floodwaters and the lecturer also showed a drain that another postgrad student had designed that separates out the liquid floodwater from solid matter that would have risen out of sewers. It was actually quite interesting. The lecture then showed us to the concrete lab where there was this big machine that cost £900k used to compress concrete on all 3 axis simultaneously. It was sponsored by the nuclear industry and was used to test concrete used in nuclear reactor containment vessels. Again it was actually quite interesting.

Then from there we got the train back home and overall it was a very good day and I like the look and feel of the uni as a whole and the department and also the research focus