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The Lafayette Steel Bridge Team did so well at the Mid-Atlantic Steel Bridge Competition April 29, it not only won first place overall, but also won each individual category.

“The win was decisive, with a final score that beat the nearest competitor by a factor of more than three,” says Steve Kurtz, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and steel bridge team adviser.

This is now the second year in a row that the team has qualified for the National competition, which will be held May 26th and 27th in Salt Lake City, Utah. Last year’s team finished in 21st place.

The core design team members for the bridge are civil engineering students Lauren Adinolfi ’06 (Hopewell Junction, N.Y.), Brian Jennings ’06 (Old Bridge, N.J.), Debra Gilkerson ’06 (Albany, Calif.), Lee Vanzler ’07 (Sharon, Mass.), and Eric Backlund ’07 (Parlin, N.J.).

Adinolfi, Jennings, and Gilkerson are earning academic credit for their work on the project through an independent study. Others, like Lee and Backlund, also participated in a separate steel bridge competition against classmates in Kurtz’s course, Fundamentals of Structural Engineering. Students design and fabricate bridges according to the rules of the national competition.

“My team members and I worked so hard on this project, especially during the week before the competition,” Jennings says. “To perform so well and get first place by such a huge margin made all the hard work worth it.”

At the competition, the team must construct a low-cost steel bridge within a limited time period. The bridge must be able to support 2,500 pounds of vertical weight that deflects little under load. Each year the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC), which sponsors the event, changes the rules of the national competition dramatically to ensure that no one can win with a previous model.

“The rules this year make it so bridge deflections will be about twice what they were last year,” says Jennings. “But our bridge deflected the same as what last year’s did which shows how much we have improved.”

The team also won all the individual structural and construction categories: lightness, stiffness, structural efficiency, construction speed, and construction economy.

“I think a major contributor to our success is the passion of the steel bridge team,” says Adinolfi. “The members are truly interested and excited by the competition and have an overwhelming desire to improve on last year’s design. We also have three senior students participating in steel bridge as an independent study. [Because of that] we were able to devote a large amount of time to the design and optimization of the bridge.”

The team will practice heavily over the next few weeks in preparation for the national competition. Jennings says very little will be changed concerning the design. The main difference he wants to see is more speed. At the regional competition, the team built the bridge in 17 minutes. He believes they can finish in less than 10 minutes. Overall, he is hoping for a top 10 placing.

“To prepare for nationals we will mainly be making the bridge easier to construct,” says Adinolfi. “A major component of the competition is building the bridge as fast as possible, so our build team will be practicing the build sequence to eliminate any confusion.”

At the regional competition, the construction crew consisted of Jennings, Vanzler, Trevor Ortolano ’07 (East Nassau, N.Y.), and Craig Bloom ’07 (Monaca, Pa.). Other contributors to the bridge project are Kyle DeFranceschi ’09 (Catasauqua, Pa.), Jack Murphy ’06 (Easton, Pa.), Joe Danatzko ’07 (West Caldwell, N.J.), Lee Chrisman ’07 (Essex, Conn.), Debra Perrone ’08 (Fair Lawn, N.J.), and Dave Massenzio ’06 (Cranston, R.I.).

“There is no better way of applying our structural engineering knowledge than the steel bridge project,” says Jennings. “In practice, structural engineers design something and then may never even see the structure they designed. We not only get to see it, but we get to build it ourselves.”

Categorized in: Academic News