Nervous chatter muffled by face coverings reverberated through GB-117 last week, as students in Prof. Evan Bentz’s class filtered in slowly.
It wasn’t a typical Friday morning class. The tables and chairs were pushed to the sides. Instead of textbooks and laptops, students were cradling cardboard bridges under their arms. Today was Bridge Testing Day.
The bridge test is a rite of passage for young engineers in CIV102: Structures and Minerals – An Introduction to Engineering Design. Students are given a specific amount of cardboard, an unlimited supply of glue and told to let their engineering minds soar.
Course instructor and PhD candidate Allan Kuan is coordinating the testing from photo, to weigh-in and then the ultimate tests of structural durability.
“Students are tasked with applying theory to figure out how much load their bridge can carry, when it will fail and how it fails,” explains Kuan.
Once completed, each bridge must undergo two phases of testing.
In the first test, a student’s bridge is laid between two desks while the class’s TAs roll three 40kg “trains” across the top. If the bridge doesn’t crumple or buckle under the weight, the train moves to the press. In fact, only one bridge out of 24 failed the train test that morning.
Next, the bridges are put into a press that exerts increasing amounts of force on two separate points. The press can exert a mind-boggling amount of force, but in today’s class, students are thrilled to pass the 1,000 Newton mark, and a handful of them do.
“I think in earlier sessions this week we saw some very spectacular structures that the students came up with,” says Kuan. “The best one that we've seen so far was able to carry a hold force of 1710 Newtons.”
And the prize for passing these tests? Simply bragging rights and a sense of accomplishment. But you can tell these students are passionate about the day’s challenge.
Some bridges are plainly marked with a team name and a course code, but other bridge designers went above and beyond adding a multitude of colour and funny nicknames such as ‘Ed Sheeran’ that Kuan gets a kick out of.
“So, these students are coming up with excellent designs and you can see that some of them are quite artistic.”
By David Goldberg