Yes, I know it might not be practical to do this without errors and there’s reasons like running utilities through and quality control with inexperienced workers, but technically speaking, could you make stronger structures with less materials using stronger structural shapes? Maybe it’s just more pleasing to our eyes everything being straight and square and such, but what about utility canopies and tents where you want to have your structural members as light and portable as possible? Why do we not have tetrahedron shaped tents that have 3 small, collapsible, yet rigid poles and a firing they go in at the top instead of having long flexible ones?
In: Engineering
Because everything only needs to be strong enough for the intended usage.
We rarely optimize for strength over everything else. And when we do, it’s still generally not a tetrahedron. The loads and fixed points are assessed and a truss like structure is designed that is suited for the various multiple important loading scenarios, and the design is the best fit to handle those while complying with other requirements such as being manufacturable and deployable, costs being minimized or meeting budget requirements, optimizing for some other parameters such as minimum weight or maintenance requirements, handling some anticipated kinds of impacts or (mis)handling loads or incidental damage types, having a sufficiently long service life in an environment with chemicals or cyclic loads or UV or whatever else is going on, and so on.
A now-getting-old mechanical engineering code named Optistuct might be an interesting google run for you. It’s one attempt to make it easy to obtain a generic near-ideal structural design for any component. It won’t always get it, but if you were to learn the details, the methodology they use has broad enough applicability and is well enough implemented that it can usually be an effective tool to improve the structural optimization of a mechanical design.
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