Student Chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)2005 Conference

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April 6-7

Top Row: Dan Logsden, Jeremy Nelson, Dr. Edgar, Jeremy Tuck, Pat Dowse, Hal Mead
Second Row: Thad Hunter, Ben Weaver, Denise Barker, Josh Palik, Christy Guenther
Bottom Row: Richard Price, Jim Staebler, Ty Soukup, Ben Nemec, Forest Todd, Wendel Lewis
Not Shown: Evan O'Toole

Thursday, April 6

We were scheduled to have 25 people going. Because several students were going to have a lab test that morning, we were set up to leave at 10:00 sharp!!! All the vans were ready at 8:00, and everything got loaded (bags, equipment, canoe, bridge, not the students!) by 10:00
but the photo shoot took 15 minutes.

The trip was a typical UW vehicle trip. The trailer is being pulled by a GMC with 110,000 miles on it. The vehicle required gas at Rawlins, Rock Springs, Evanston and Salt Lake (and back again). So, if you do the math, that's 16 gallons in 100 miles or 6.25 mpg. When we called motor pool, the comment was "Yeah, they suck gas if you pull a trailer." Yeah, No Kidding. I was going to keep a log of Great Filling Stations we Visited, but I ran out of memory on the card. We arrived successfully in SLC, picked up our registration materials and relaxed for the evening. You know, dinner and relaxing. Some people were more relaxed than others.

Oh, yeah, and the bridge team practiced in the parking lot. It was felt that if you couldn't see the parts, they really weren't needed on the bridge anyway.

Friday April, 7

Opening Ceremonies

The bridge team decided they would practice. Everyone else went to the Opening Ceremonies. Pat Dowse did an outstanding and typically Pat relaxed presentation on the Student Chapter.

 

The Paper Presentations

Wendel Lewis gave the Non-Technical Paper on the Mead Paper topic, entitled "The Power of Technology". Hal Mead gave his technical talk on "", but he ducked out before I could get his picture.

Pre Design

Pre-Design was new this year. It was to make a tunnel in sand inside a box. The tunnel was made around a four inch diameter piece of black plastic pipe. You were given some poster board, 32-3"x5" index cards and 10 feet of duct tape. The sand was supposed to be dry, but it rained that day so the sand was wet. The team put the pipe in the middle of the box and compacted both sides by stomping and walking along the sides. As they built up, they left the center loose to get an arching effect.

Minor Problem, the pipe didn't want to come out.


Hal finds a new use for a Modified Proctor hammer.


The load system being setup and the tunnel in sand.


The laser beam is just along the edge of the triangle.


The final load was 2.9 tons before the tunnel collapsed enough to stop the laser beam.

The Steel Bridge

The steel bridge team had worked late into the night to practice (finally!). When the big day came, there was an interesting chain of events. The bridge was one of four out of 10 that qualified to test. Some details in the rules required disqualifing bridges if they didn't make several non-safety related issues. In one region, only two out of 19 bridges qualified. We ended up in Third Place in the Bridge competition.