This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
The American Institute of Steel Construction Student Steel Bridge Competition is a student contest that tests the knowledge and practicality of teams of university students in the field of structural engineering. Ideally, the design and fabrication of the bridge is conceived and completed entirely by the students and the participation of the students in the process is highly encouraged. Some schools may not have the proper facilities and guidance necessary to erect the model bridge and may work with a commercial fabricator. However, the students must be fully responsible for the design and instructions, they must coordinate with the fabricator, and they must monitor the construction process.
The bridges must follow the specifications explained in the rule book. The rules of the competition are changed annually to further enhance the quality of the competition and to prevent the submission of an already existing bridge.
The steel bridge competition, in its embryonic form, began as a miniature bridge design competition using balsa wood to see which competitor's bridge is the best. Robert E. Shaw Jr., Associate Director of Education for the American Institute of Steel Construction, initiated the steel bridge competition in the spring of 1987 and was honored by the AISC in 2000 for his achievement. The first teams to compete were Lawrence Technological University(who hosted the competition), Wayne State University, and Michigan Technological University. [1] In 1988, the competition grew to four regional conference competitions: North Central at the University of Detroit, Great Lakes at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Carolinas at the University of North Carolina - Charlotte, and Ohio Valley at the University of Louisville. In 1989, nine conferences held steel bridge-building competitions: Upstate New York, Carolinas, Ohio Valley, North Central, Midwest, Mid-Continent, Rocky Mountain, Southeast, and Texas. Michigan State University dominated their Conference with bridges built quickly with innovative, lightweight designs that set the pattern for future competitions. In 1992, Fromy Rosenberg, who was the new Director of AISC College Relations, began the first ever National Student Steel Bridge Competition. [2]
The following are past champions. [3]
For a full description of the 2016 rules and regulations, including the scoring go to: [4]
The different categories in the competition that will be judged are:
The overall winner has the lowest sum from the construction economy and structural efficiency categories.
Getting to the National Competition - Teams compete at regional conferences around the United States. The top teams from each region are invited to compete at the National Competition each year.
A cantilever is a rigid structural element that extends horizontally and is unsupported at one end. Typically it extends from a flat vertical surface such as a wall, to which it must be firmly attached. Like other structural elements, a cantilever can be formed as a beam, plate, truss, or slab.
Limit State Design (LSD), also known as Load And Resistance Factor Design (LRFD), refers to a design method used in structural engineering. A limit state is a condition of a structure beyond which it no longer fulfills the relevant design criteria. The condition may refer to a degree of loading or other actions on the structure, while the criteria refer to structural integrity, fitness for use, durability or other design requirements. A structure designed by LSD is proportioned to sustain all actions likely to occur during its design life, and to remain fit for use, with an appropriate level of reliability for each limit state. Building codes based on LSD implicitly define the appropriate levels of reliability by their prescriptions.
Woodsman refers to the title of competitors participating in competitive timber sports. Woodsmen participate in various events that replicate real skills used by lumberjacks while cutting down trees and preparing the wood. Woodsman Competitions are a competitive, co-ed intercollegiate sport in the United States, Canada and elsewhere based on various skills traditionally part of forestry educational and technical training programs. In these competitions participants use various tools, such as racing axes, throwing axes, cross-cut saws, and chainsaws. In North America, the sport currently is organized in five regional divisions: northeastern, mid-Atlantic, southern, midwestern, and western.
An I-beam is any of various structural members with an I or H-shaped cross-section. Technical terms for similar items include H-beam, w-beam, universal beam (UB), rolled steel joist (RSJ), or double-T. I-beams are typically made of structural steel and serve a wide variety of construction uses.
A concrete canoe is a canoe made of concrete, typically created for an engineering competition.
Combined driving is an equestrian sport involving carriage driving. In this discipline, the driver sits on a vehicle drawn by a single horse, a pair or a team of four. The sport has three phases: dressage, cross-country marathon and obstacle cone driving — patterned after the mounted equestrian sport of eventing. It is one of the ten international equestrian sport horse disciplines recognized by the Fédération Équestre Internationale (FEI). Combined driving became an FEI discipline in 1970 when Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, the then-president of FEI, produced the first rule book.
A steel detailer is a person who produces detailed drawings for steel fabricators and steel erectors. The detailer prepares detailed plans, drawings and other documents for the manufacture and erection of steel members used in the construction of buildings, bridges, industrial plans, and nonbuilding structures.
An orthotropic bridge or orthotropic deck is typically one whose fabricated deck consists of a structural steel deck plate stiffened either longitudinally with ribs or transversely, or in both directions. This allows the fabricated deck both to directly bear vehicular loads and to contribute to the bridge structure's overall load-bearing behaviour. The orthotropic deck may be integral with or supported on a grid of deck framing members, such as transverse floor beams and longitudinal girders. All these various choices for the stiffening elements, e.g., ribs, floor beams and main girders, can be interchanged, resulting in a great variety of orthotropic panels.
Structural steel is a category of steel used for making construction materials in a variety of shapes. Many structural steel shapes take the form of an elongated beam having a profile of a specific cross section. Structural steel shapes, sizes, chemical composition, mechanical properties such as strengths, storage practices, etc., are regulated by standards in most industrialized countries.
The American Welding Society (AWS) was founded in 1919 as a non-profit organization to advance the science, technology and application of welding and allied joining and cutting processes, including brazing, soldering and thermal spraying.
Steel Design, or more specifically, Structural Steel Design, is an area of structural engineering used to design steel structures. These structures include schools, houses, bridges, commercial centers, tall buildings, warehouses, aircraft, ships and stadiums. The design and use of steel frames are commonly employed in the design of steel structures. More advanced structures include steel plates and shells.
The American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) is a not-for-profit technical institute and trade association for the use of structural steel in the construction industry of the United States.
NJIT Steel Bridge Team is a team within the New Jersey Institute of Technology's ASCE chapter). It consists of undergraduate students who are attending at NJIT, majoring in civil engineering, and also members of ASCE. Every year, the team competes against other schools in a steel bridge competition.
The Nathan M. Newmark Civil Engineering Laboratory, or Newmark Lab, located at 205 N. Mathews Avenue in Urbana, Illinois on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, houses the university's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The Lab was built in 1967, and has been modified and updated a number of times since then. The facility was named after professor and department head Nathan M. Newmark after his death.
In the Eurocode series of European standards (EN) related to construction, Eurocode 2: Design of concrete structures specifies technical rules for the design of concrete, reinforced concrete and prestressed concrete structures, using the limit state design philosophy. It was approved by the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) on 16 April 2004 to enable designers across Europe to practice in any country that adopts the code.
The James E. Roberts Memorial Bridge is a 1,400 foot two-lane highway bridge along the California State Route 120/California State Route 49 concurrency, in Tuolumne County, California. The bridge spans the Tuolumne River just north of Lake Don Pedro, near the community of Chinese Camp. It opened in 1971.
The College of Engineering and Science (COES) is one of five colleges at Louisiana Tech University, a public research university in Ruston, Louisiana. The roots of the college date back to the founding of Louisiana Tech in 1894 when the Department of Mechanics was created. Today, the college includes twenty-five degree-granting programs: fourteen undergraduate, seven master's, and four doctoral programs. College programs are located on the Louisiana Tech campus in Ruston, Louisiana. In addition, courses are offered at the CenturyLink Headquarters in Monroe, Louisiana, at Barksdale Air Force Base, in Bossier City, Louisiana, and at the Louisiana Tech Shreveport Center in Shreveport, Louisiana.
A buckling-restrained brace (BRB) is a structural brace in a building, designed to allow the building to withstand cyclical lateral loadings, typically earthquake-induced loading. It consists of a slender steel core, a concrete casing designed to continuously support the core and prevent buckling under axial compression, and an interface region that prevents undesired interactions between the two. Braced frames that use BRBs – known as buckling-restrained braced frames, or BRBFs – have significant advantages over typical braced frames.
The Phyllis J. Tilley Memorial Bridge is a pedestrian bridge in Fort Worth, Texas.
Metal profile sheet systems are used to build cost efficient and reliable envelopes of mostly commercial buildings. They have evolved from the single skin metal cladding often associated with agricultural buildings to multi-layer systems for industrial and leisure application. As with most construction components, the ability of the cladding to satisfy its functional requirements is dependent on its correct specification and installation. Also important is its interaction with other elements of the building envelope and structure. Metal profile sheets are metal structural members that due to the fact they can have different profiles, with different heights and different thickness, engineers and architects can use them for a variety of buildings, from a simple industrial building to a high demand design building. Trapezoidal profiles are large metal structural members, which, thanks to the profiling and thickness, retain their high load bearing capability. They have been developed from the corrugated profile. The profile programme offered by specific manufacturers covers a total of approximately 60 profile shapes with different heights. Cassettes are components that are mainly used as the inner shell in dual-shell wall constructions. They are mainly used in walls today, even though they were originally designed for use in roofs.
AISC Student Steel Bridge Competition Information: aisc.org/studentsteelbridgecompetition