Balsa Wood Truss

Designing, building, and testing a balsa wood truss was a term project for a Mechanics of Deformable Solids course. In a team of four, we were tasked with designing and building a truss with the optimum load-bearing capacity and material weight. The truss was built from balsa wood sheets and wooden dowels. This project was an opportunity to design a product from start to finish in a controlled environment while considering realistic constraints. Our team was responsible for project planning, how were we going to get from the given task to the demonstration day, and the design, testing, and overall performance of the product.

The initial design was created in an online software which calculated the forces applied to the members in the frame. This design was then made in AutoCad with specific member shapes being chosen considering strength and cost of materials. The design was tested to failure and three iterations were designed and built. An important part of the design was the use of T-beams to prevent buckling, the most likely form of failure, as well as failure due to twisting which was caused by practical impacts not seen in calculations.

I was in charge of contributing to the initial design of the main structure including determining the shape that best distributed the force caused by the load as well as supervising the laser cutting of the balsa wood and the building of the truss.