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September 1, 2006 Vol.77, no. 3F
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AND WOMEN OF STEEL: The 2006 Steel
Bridge team poses with its project. Check out the bridge and
concrete canoe in the O’Brien breezeway. PHOTO
PROVIDED BY STEEL BRIDGE
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Made of concrete and steel
CEE teams build bridges and race canoes during summer competitions
Cal’s two CEE teams did well in competitions over the summer. The Concrete Canoe team took fourth overall in the American Society of Civil Engineers National Concrete Canoe Competition held in June at Oklahoma State University. It was the team’s twelfth top-five finish in the last 15 years of competing at the national level.
“I’m really excited about finishing fourth place,” says CEE senior and last year’s project manager Ben Huie. “Of course, I wanted to do better than last year’s team [which also took also fourth place]. But we did well this year in the races. Our paddling captain, Joseph Liu, is also on the dragon boat team and he helped us be stronger in our paddling.” Liu is a senior in CEE.
Concrete canoe teams must design and fabricate a canoe made of concrete, then compete in men’s and women’s distance and sprint races as well as in oral presentation, technical paper and final product categories. Cal’s canoe, “Caliente,” weighed in at 175 pounds with a length of 21.5 feet.
“Last year we had a knowledgeable group so we innovated by using a ‘float ring,’ a donut-shaped piece of foam that displaced some of the concrete and made the canoe lighter,” Huie explains. “I think it was successful, and it will help this coming year when we can refine and improve it.” (Each year, the team builds a new canoe but employs techniques learned in previous years.)
Cal Steel Bridge Team
Teams competing at the National Student Steel Bridge Competition had to construct their bridges on the spot, clocks ticking. Though some parts were preassembled, team members raced to put together their bridge and were penalized for dropping things, from a large part to a tiny bolt. On top of that, they had to build in environmentally sensitive conditions across a fictitious river they couldn’t touch. In that kind of pressure cooker, Cal’s Steel Bridge team built their 20-foot-long, 1/10th scale bridge in 7.5 minutes, placing eleventh overall out of 42 teams.
Construction speed wasn’t the only category in the two-day competition held in Salt Lake City in late May. Teams were judged on aesthetics, economy, lightness, stiffness and efficiency. Bridges were loaded with 2,500 pounds and measured to see how much they drooped or “deflected” from their original position. They were also pulled sideways with 50-pound weights to measure their lateral load.
CEE senior Matt Vaggione has been on the Steel Bridge team since he was a sophomore and this year he is project manager. He’s learned a lot from the club, he says. “I have a better understanding now of what professors are talking about in class because I’ve seen how it’s worked on our bridge.”
Go to www.ce.berkeley.edu/~steelbridge/Main.htm and http://canoe.berkeley.edu/ for more information. |
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