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Structural integrity of built environment is key to ensure long lasting infrastructure that serve their respective purpose. This report serves to explore elements that factor in structural dynamics. The elements range from angular motion, reciprocating motion, and structural dynamics concepts of resonance and damping. This investigation uses 3D printing of models to gain a concrete understanding of these concepts through a series of three challenges. Challenge 1 focuses on design and testing of a wheel to obtain minimum angular acceleration. Challenge 2 focuses on the design and testing of reciprocating motion devices that would later be used for Challenge 3. Challenge 3 investigates how mass and stiffness of structural columns affect the natural frequency of a structure. This challenge incorporates angular motion and reciprocating motion concepts to subject a designed structure to forced and free vibration. Challenge 1 results show that mass concentrated further from the axis of rotation reduce the angular acceleration of an object in angular motion. Challenge 2 reveals that translating reciprocating motion to linear motion can be mathematically modelled and the responses largely depend on the reciprocating motion device. Challenge 3 reveals that real life structures exhibit lightly damped conditions and reach a point of failure at high displacements at resonance. 

This report explores the topics of dynamics with a focus on structures and 3-dimensional printing. With the first challenge, angular velocity and acceleration were the focus. The second challenge involved the ideas of converting rotational motion into linear motion. However, a target frequency and acceleration meant that an equation needed to be derived in order to gage the magnitude of the dimensions necessary to achieve this target. The final challenge required the employment of material properties and displayed the inaccuracies of the 3-D printer. Not only were topics important to dynamics highlighted through these challenges but diving further into the intricacies of 3-D printing was a large portion of experimentation and learning. 

This project intends to explore dynamic concepts through the use of 3-D printed models. The project is divided into 3 challenges. The first challenge explores rotational dynamics through the development of a 3-D printed wheel. The second challenge, compounding on the dynamics explored in the previous, explores reciprocating motion through the development of a 3-D printed table-top shake table. The final challenge explores structural dynamics through the development of columns for a single-story building. This report describes the models and published data that can be used by others for structural dynamics training. 

The following challenges are applications of the dynamics of a one-story structure with a vertical load and a horizontally applied force from a shake table. The shake table is made of 3D-printed components that create a scotch yoke mechanism to create linear motion from angular motion. There are three challenges where Challenge 1 serves as an introduction for Challenges 2 and 3. The purpose of these challenges is to create a single-story structure that will move on the shake table. The displacement is measured and the frequency of the roof of that structure is found.