Introduction to Mechanical Engineering
Professor
December 12, 2017
Tacoma Narrows Bridge Disaster
As unfortunate as it is there are many engineering disasters that surround us in our day to
day lives. Some are very minor, such as poorly designed pencils that do not work properly. Some
are major, such as building and bridge failures. As an aspiring civil engineer, I chose one of the
most famous civil engineering disasters of all time. The collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
The Tacoma Narrows bridge was a suspension bridge in Washington State, United States. The
Tacoma Narrows bridge opened to traffic on July 1, 1940 and collapsed on November 7, 1940.
This is a very short life span for such an expensive project.
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster is often cited as an example of mechanical
resonance and its sometimes-extreme effects. When the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was built in
1940, its design was somewhat revolutionary. The majority of bridges up until that point were
truss bridges, designed to hold the immense weight of trains. The truss design simultaneously
stiffened the bridge and allowed wind to more easily pass through the structure. The original
Tacoma Narrows Bridge, however, was a suspended plate girder bridge. Automobiles were quite
a bit lighter and new bridge designs were engineered for the sake of economy and aestheticism.
But this change in design was mostly un-experimented with and the forces that act on bridges
were far less known at the time.
Mechanical resonance is defined as: the response of an object that is free to vibrate to a
periodic force with the same frequency as the natural frequency of the object. This is considered
mechanical because there is physical contact between the periodic force and the vibrating object.
The bridge, nicknamed Galloping Gertie started its interesting movement before construction
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of the bridge was even finished. Winds as low as 5 miles an hour caused mild oscillations of
small amplitudes. The bridge was considered to be safe because people could indeed travel
across it. However, this drastically changed the day of the bridges collapse when gusts of wind
up to 30-45 miles per hour caused the bridge to collapse. The idea behind mechanical resonance
is that all objects have a natural frequency to which they vibrate, known as a resonant frequency.
While the wind held at 35 mile per hour, the bridge held in its transverse vibration mode, with an
amplitude of 1.5 feet. However, when the wind increased to 42 miles per hour and a cable on the
mid-span snapped, causing an unbalanced condition, the bridge began a 0.2 Hz torsional
vibration mode. This can be described as a corkscrew shape, a sideways motion where one side
of the bridge would rise and the other would fall, and vice versa. The amplitude was then an
astounding 28 feet. The conclusion was that the wind reached a certain velocity that put its
frequency very close to the natural frequency of the bridge, exciting it far more than it previously
had and causing the significantly larger amplitude.
One problem soon found with this theory was that for mechanical resonance to occur the
force acting on it must have constant periodicity, and gusts of wind are neither constant nor
evenly periodic, as the wind pressure could change at random. Therefore, the steady oscillations
seen on the bridge would be impossible. The solution was seen in a process known as vortex
shedding. The basic idea of vortex shedding is that when a force moves past a blunt object it
creates alternating low-pressure vortices on the downstream side of the object. The object will
tend to move toward the low-pressure zone. This would have been the cause of the alternating
vertical motions of the torsional mode. Eventually, if the frequency of vortex shedding matches
the natural resonant frequency of the structure, the structure will begin to resonate and the
structure's movement can become self-sustaining.
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The Tacoma Narrows Bridge failed due to the lack of wind tunnel testing done on the
new evolutionary bridge design. This is one of the biggest mistakes that was made during the
construction of the bridge. Engineers could have predicted the failure of this bridge if proper
studies had been run on the design, at the time it was not required to do so. Now before a bridge
is constructed there are several tests ran on the design and the materials in order to ensure that
the bridge is safe. From this disaster engineers have learned that new and revolutionary are not
always the best things.
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Works Cited
Billah, K. Y., and Robert H. Scanlan. "Resonance, Tacoma Narrows Bridge Failure, and
Undergraduate Physics Textbooks." American Journal of Physics 59.2 (1991): 118-24.
Mark Ketchum's Online Scrapbook. Web. 09 Dec 2017 <[Link]
Irvine, Tom. "The Tacoma Narrows Bridge Failure Revision A." Vibrationdata. Tom Irvine, 29
Dec. 1999. Web. Web. 09 Dec 2017. <[Link]
Ketchum, Mark. "History of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge." Mark Ketchum's Online Scrapbook.
Web. 09 Dec 2017. <[Link]
