Golden Gate Bridge Analysis

This document contains Assignment 1 of Morgan Jenkins Gregory, Mechanical Engineering student at the North-West University of Potchefstroom, for FIAP 172.
In this document the individual provides a critical engineering review on the development of the Golden Gate Bridge. His review provides a detailed discussion of the specific engineering problem statement, how the solutions to the problem were developed and applied as well as the resources that were used throughout the development of the bridge. He also reviews the roles and efforts of the chief engineer that worked on the Golden Gate Bridge.
This document would also include a conclusion made of the document as whole.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………….……………..3

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………………..11 1. Introduction
The Golden Gate Bridge is one of the United States of America’s most known landmarks and icons. Joseph Strauss was the designer of the 2700 meter long bridge in 1932. The Golden Gate Bridge connects San Francisco and the Marin headlands, with a famous colour of International Orange.

The Golden Gate Bridge is a suspension bridge, which means that the bridge is mainly supported by cables (129 000 kilometres of wire to be exact) stretched between vertical towers.
The bridge took around 4 years to complete while construction started in 1933, and it was opened to pedestrians on 27 May 1937. For the time, the bridge was a very big engineering achievement, with many hurdles that had to be passed to complete. Figure 2.1 shows a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge, an icon of San Francisco, California, USA.

(Figure 2.1)
2. Engineering problem
The San Francisco Bay Region is topographically unique, with mountains and a bay of vast size. Just after the First World War automobiles were increasing in numbers dramatically and this had a huge impact on the system getting over the bay. The system used were old rebuilt ferry boats that had high maintenance costs and the fare was very high too. In 1921 new efficient diesel powered ferry boats were put into usage that were designed to ferry automobiles across the bay. This saved costs dramatically, but by 1929 the number of vehicles that crossed the ferry travel to and from