Title and Abstract

Investigation on the energy efficiency of different bridge types
A movable bridge is simply a bridge capable of moving to allow access to an area that may have been permanently blocked off if it were a regular bridge instead. This makes moveable bridges very useful as they can allow land access between two areas that were blocked off via water bodies without removing the usage of said water body as a path (Wikipedia Article on Moveable Bridges). Our main purpose was is to find out the most energy efficient movable bridge. Due to time constraints, we only had time to construct and test models for 3 models, namely, the bascule bridge, the rolling bascule bridge and the vertical lift bridge.
We tried to create a smaller version of the actual moving bridge made from materials which are easier to use and construct like cardboard.
From our experiment, we found out that there is no significant change in the amount of power any movable bridge uses as long as it uses the same number of motors. If the bridges do not use the same number of motors, most likely the one that uses a less number of motors use less electrical power.
With this information, we now know that we have little to worry about which movable bridge is the most energy-efficient because we would not want to have the same kind of movable bridges everywhere in the world and since we want variety the most of the common bridges are those operated with two motors. If people learn to strive for our function rather than our ornamentation we might be able to make more energy efficient bridges.

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