Competitions and Trains

**Tankbuster** · January 22, 2012, 05:47 PM

Hey guys,

A few months from now a student organisation I'm part of will be hosting an engineering competition for high school and low-level university students. One of my jobs is finding an appropriate topic for the event. The topic is fairly broad but has to be linked in some way to trains.

To give you an idea of the rules of this competition, teams of 4 or 5 students will be working for around 3 hours on solving a specific problem. Afterwards their designs will be tested by a jury of engineers, and the best designs get a prize. This means that the limitations of the topic/problem have to be:
- the difficulty should be such that the teams have some kind of solution after 3 hours, but it's obviously best if it's hard enough that their designs are still somewhat sub-optimal so that there's variation in the results
- there needs to be something testable about it. Designs will be juged on creativity and subjective criteria, but there also needs to be some kind of objective criteria that students can strive for during testing
- should lend itself to creativity

Basically I'm looking for inspiration on what kind of problem I could give them. Right now my main ideas are:
1) Tasking them with building a series of railroad switches of sorts, maybe something like this but then more elaborate.
2) Making a monorail trajectory and then tasking them with building a train that stays on it for as long as possible and goes as fast as possible
3) (Adventurous) Giving them a bunch of magnets and have them construct the basic principle of a Maglev train - I like this because it's somewhat high-tech, but I'm not sure it's actually that hard to do

If any of you have experience with trains or subjects of this kind, do you have any additional ideas?

Thanks in advance.

**Sphere** · January 23, 2012, 10:37 AM

Well, one interesting problem involved with trains is designing a suspension bridge that will carry them.

Suspension bridges have problems when a large singular load moves across them because such loads cause large deformations. Trains cannot accomodate large dips in the tracks and need a very flat grade to keep from gettting stuck.

Early on there were a whole slew of different solutions to this "sagging" problem; criss-crossing cables to spread the load out, cables that actual tie the bridge deck into the ground (to keep it from moving), large steel trusses supporting the bridge deck to keep it stiff etc.

The simplest solution is actually counter intuitive; weigh down the whole bridge deck so the load of the train is only marginal extra weight, and doesn't cause large sags as it moves across.

I don't know how you can spin all this into a 3 hour competition, but its a thought.

**Phier** · January 23, 2012, 02:01 PM

If you want to REALLY challenge them, have them come up with a high speed rail line that does not rely on urban commuter traffic to be economically viable.

One thing you could do is make the grade and power supply a constant and have them come up with the fastest design that works under those parameters.

**John Doe** · January 23, 2012, 03:53 PM

Operation research, or timetable calculation?

from wikipedia

Prior to the formal start of the field, early work in operational research was carried out by individuals such as Charles Babbage. His research into the cost of transportation and sorting of mail led to England's universal "Penny Post" in 1840, and studies into the dynamical behaviour of railway vehicles in defence of the GWR's broad gauge

Basically you set up an hybrid travelling salesman problem, those problems are great because they are easy to understand and have a lot of possible solutions, yet finding the optimum could be real tricky. It will be easy for each team to find a solution, and use the 3 hours to find a strategy to find better one. It's all abstract, and seems to tick all your boxes.

**Nikitn** · January 24, 2012, 05:14 AM

the most fun would be making the fastest thing with limited resources, tho this will probably turn it into a mostly aerodynamics problem I guess

**Tankbuster** · February 17, 2012, 08:51 AM

I'd like to thank those who responded: you guys gave me some really good ideas and some will see application, though for legal reasons I can't actually say which ones (until the event anyway).

Thanks again guys