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Twenty-three junior civil engineering majors in six teams will square off today to see who can design and build the best small-scale earth retention walls using paper, poster board, tape, and sand.
Working in Acopian Engineering Center room 317, three teams will start preparations at 9:30 a.m., with construction beginning about 40 minutes later, says Mary Roth, associate professor and head of civil and environmental engineering and one of four instructors for the design course. The other three teams will start getting ready at 1:10 p.m. and begin building at around 1:50 p.m.
The groups will construct their walls, which are made of sand but reinforced with paper, according to the rules of a new Geotechnical Competition organized by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). The walls will be constructed within plywood boxes whose inside dimensions are 18 inches wide, 18 inches high, and 26 inches long. The goal is to use the least amount of paper and shortest time for assembly and construction.
“They’re going through the whole design process, including meeting every three days as a team and documenting everything in memos,” says Roth. “It’s teamwork in a hands-on project that has all the elements of what they’ll be doing in their civil engineering careers.”
The technical concepts in the project are fairly simple, she notes, but it’s a challenge once economics – using minimal amounts of paper – are added to the equation. In addition, the students came up with their own testing method for the frictional resistance between the soil and paper, using clamps, pulleys, and stacks of small plastic containers as they adjusted weights. They also developed a method to test the tensile strength of the paper, which involved clamping it and attaching it to a string on a pulley tied to a bucket. They filled the paper with sand until the paper broke.
“It’s interesting,” says Roth. “They do the design initially with a computer program that they wrote, then test the walls in the lab. The walls are failing differently than they’ve expected. They realize that what they’re designing for isn’t necessarily what results. It’s a lot of hands-on design and construction experience.”
The design considerations of these mini-walls are the same as that of retaining walls commonly used on highways, adds Roth.
Although Lafayette’s ASCE region is not sponsoring a Geotechnical Competition this year, Roth hopes the class project will build interest in entering a competition when a regional ASCE competition is organized or even in sponsoring a regional event on campus.
In addition to this geotechnical experience overseen by Roth, students in the junior design course will complete projects later this semester in the structural, environmental, and water areas of civil engineering under the guidance of professors Steve Kurtz, Art Kney, and Roger Ruggles, respectively.
Other projects taken on by teams of civil engineering majors this year include a steel bridge design competition, two water purification challenges with trips to New Mexico and Honduras, and a senior design class that is helping the City of Easton improve pedestrian safety and other aspects of Third Street near the Route 22 intersection.