Ohio Valley Regional Conference
Last weekend was the Ohio Valley Regional Conference (OVRC) that I talked about in my last blog. It turned out to be a lot of fun. Many civil engineering students got involved and competed in the activities throughout the weekend. In fact UD was represented in all the events held. These included surveying, technical paper, AutoCAD, concrete frisbee, concrete canoe, environmental contest, and steel bridge. I was on the construction team for the steel bridge. Although we did not advance to the national competition, we were mostly pleased with our performance and made huge improvements over our bridge from last year.
I drove from work in Cincinnati to The Ohio State University in Columbus where the competition was held. I arrived at the motel we stayed in and then went to a bar and grill where the conference was having a social gathering. It was fun to talk with my colleagues from UD as well as students from other schools. One guy from OSU had come to the Chi Epsilon (civil engineering honor society) conference a couple weeks ago at UD. After retiring for the night, we woke up early on Saturday morning to go to the fieldhouse where the steel bridge competition was taking place. We did not compete until 2pm, but we wanted to observe some of the other teams construct and load their bridges. We also needed to practice a couple times, since fabrication had just completed the week before. The other teams' bridges were quite impressive, and almost all of them passed the loading test. We were prepared to compete and to definitely have fun, though. We did one practice run of constructing the bridge outside in the parking lot. After eating lunch, we got ready to do another practice run. Since it was starting to rain, we started setting up inside. However, the carpet that covered the floor inside was not flat enough for our piers to stand on. So our fabrication advisor, Bill, ran to his shop nearby and quickly welded some wider plates to the bottoms of the piers.
Finally, it was our turn to compete, right after the OSU team. We went as fast as we could and completed our construction in just over 20 minutes. Not too bad for just one full practice run. Then we loaded the bridge laterally with 75 pounds and passed that test. The vertical loading test involved gradually putting on steel angles until the max load of 2500 pounds. I along with a couple other members of the team loaded the bridge until it failed at about 2000 pounds. It failed at one of the welds for the hangers. Even though it failed, we had fun and were happy with our accomplishments. The judges were very strict with the dimension requirements for the bridge, and we had only one violation.
There was a business meeting and dinner that night at a restaurant and gathering center called the Buckeye Hall of Fame. It was conveniently packed with OSU fans for the basketball game.
It was definitely a fun and educational experience, and I look forward to doing it again next year. I've attached some photos of our bridge from the competition.
Apr 7, 2007 1:55 PM
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