Several University of Texas at Tyler students pose with their canoe named Bridgette that they will enter in the national concrete canoe competition.

A team from The University of Texas at Tyler plans to enter a two-piece canoe, the first in history of the 29th annual American Society of Civil Engineers’ National Concrete Canoe Competition that UT Tyler will host Wednesday through Saturday.

Out of 203 teams of civil engineering students that competed in regional competitions, 21 from colleges and universities across the U.S. and Canada qualified to compete in the upcoming national contest, billed as “America’s Cup of Civil Engineering.”

Engineering students spend hundreds of hours throughout the year researching, designing and constructing their concrete canoes. At the same time, they are applying real life principles of engineering that they learn in the classroom and then race their canoe in the ASCE competition, which is an extracurricular activity.

UT Tyler has entered the competition for nine years and the last couple of years has “tried to do things very out of the box and never done before,” Meagan Childress, a team member, said. The team’s canoe, called the Daisy Bradford, was displayed upright like the oil rig called Daisy Bradford two years ago.

Trying to go farther even though it seemed farfetched, UT Tyler’s team made a two-piece canoe for its entry this year. “I’m really proud of how it turned out,” Ms. Childress, 25, a civil engineering student from Gilmer, said.

In a democratic process, team members suggested names and everyone voted on which name they liked best, said Callie Newton, 24, a civil engineering major from Mesquite. The name Bridgette got the most votes. “It’s kind of a pun on how we display our canoe; we display it like a draw bridge,” Ms. Newton said.

The name also bridges the gap between UT’s Tyler and Houston campuses, said Christian Newton, 28, a mechanical engineering student from Kingwood.

Bridgette is approximately 19 feet long, around 30 inches at its widest point and weighs 565 pounds.

Bridgette is the heaviest canoe that UT Tyler has ever produced, but it’s also one of the strongest because of the two-piece design, Ms. Childress said.

People who see the concrete canoe often question whether it can be put in water, Christian Newton said. “We are saying not only are we going to put that in the water, but we are going to put four people in it and race it,” he said.

Normal concrete has a much higher specific gravity so that it sinks, but the design of the concrete mix used in making Bridgette is the right specific gravity that it will float and have buoyancy and the canoe is tall enough for four people to race it, Christian Newton said.

Because Bridgette is in two pieces, judges at the regional competition were not sure how to judge her. They first judged her in two pieces and then required the team to put her together for judging as a whole a second time.

There is a tongue and groove section and holes that align. “We can put a pin through it so that the two pieces will stay together like a peg and hole design,” Ms. Childress said. The tongue and groove is a very delicate section, added Angela Kornegay, 33, a civil engineering major from Bedford.

“The theme we went with this year is steam punk. It’s kind of a new thing. What it basically is is a sub-genre of science fiction that incorporates steam powdered machinery and it’s set in a British Victorian era,” Ms. Childress said. “The outside of our canoe is supposed to replicate welded metal put together. It’s taking old things and making them new.”

This is the first year ASCE has required teams to incorporate color schemes into the concrete mix rather than stain. “Figuring out how to do that was quite a challenge,” Ms. Kornegay.

Bridgette has yellows, reds and grays. The outside is different shades of gray in different rectangles and square figures and over that is an orange color in random patches supposed to be corroded metal. The canoe’s name is written on the inside in glitter and black letters. The school’s name is displayed on both sides so judges can see it during races.

In the construction process, the team made the ribs and skeleton, which became the spine of the canoe. Then they took a plastic wrap to a company, which sprayed foam inside to form a mold inside the canoe. “We put a layer or two of mesh down for increased strength and we do about three different layers,” Ms. Childress said.

A lot of preparation goes into it. “It’s kind of like baking a cake. You have to get all your ingredients together and make sure you have them all before you can start mixing and then the cake goes into the oven,” Callie Newton said.

In making the concrete, Ms. Childress said, “It’s always a goal to get your concrete to be less dense than water, so less than 62.4 pounds per cubic foot. This year, we created our least dense concrete ever which is 48 pounds per cubic foot. But the reason our canoe came out so heavy was we had 13 different mixes and not all of them were so light. Some of them needed extra strength. We always try to incorporate different things into our mixes to make it stronger, yet lighter. This year, we needed a really strong canoe and needed to add different mixtures into it.”

After the concrete is made, the team starts adding the concrete layers. “If it takes you too long after you’ve made the concrete, then it starts to fall off and it starts to set and you can’t get your next layer of concrete to stick to it very well,” Christian Newton said.

The UT Tyler students said that in the process of making the canoe, they learned time management, motivation, teamwork, how to work with different types of people and improve their technical writing skills.

About 25 students participate in making the canoe throughout the year. However, the team for the competition can only consist of 10 people – five women and five men – who can make presentations during the competition and only four at a time can man the canoe in races.

The UT Tyler team uses regular aluminum racing oars to paddle their canoe.

The men’s sprint and the women’s sprint are 200 meters. The co-ed sprint is 400 meters while the men’s and women’s endurance race is 600 meters.

UT Tyler competes in four categories. In the oral presentation, two or more team members present a seven-minute discussion of the canoe followed by a question and answer session with judges. Another category is the racing portion and the third portion involves display of the canoe. A fourth category is a technical report.

Twitter: @Betty_TMT

 

Closer Look

American Society of Civil Engineers’ National Concrete Canoe Competition

Canoe displays on sidewalks around UT Tyler lakes, set up 7 a.m.-9 a.m. Thursday

Weigh-in, flotation test, Harvey Lake, 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Thursday

Cardboard canoe race division, Harvey Lake, 1:30 p.m. Thursday

Oral presentations, Cowan Center Vaughn Auditorium, 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Friday

Concrete canoe races, Green Acres Baptist Retreat Center, Lake Tyler, 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday

 

Contestants

State University of New York at Buffalo

University of California at Los Angeles

The Citadel

Ecole de Technologie Superieure

Fairmont State University

University of Florida

Universite Laval

University of Maryland

McNeese State University

Michigan Technological University

University of Nevada

New York University Tandon School of Engineering

University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez

South Dakota School of Mines and Technology

Southern Illinois University at Carbondale

University of Texas at Austin

University of Texas at Tyler

University of Washington

Western Kentucky University

University of Wisconsin at Madison

University of Wisconsin at Platteville