The Society of Civil Engineers’ Steel Bridge team placed second at a national competition last week after qualifying at regionals earlier this quarter. The 25th annual National Student Steel Bridge Competition was hosted at Brigham Young University and featured 48 teams from different schools.
Steel Bridge is a project team within the Society of Civil Engineers and is also a senior project for five of the team captains.
Cal Poly’s Steel Bridge team has designed, fabricated and practiced building its bridge for the competition since the beginning of fall quarter, putting in more than 1,000 hours each.
Competition scoring combines the bridge’s weight, ability to hold weight, construction speed and other factors. These are all calculated into an overall cost, and the cheapest bridge wins.
The Cal Poly team’s second-place bridge weighed 132 pounds, took 7:33 minutes to construct and cost $3.558 million. First place went to École de Technologie Supérieure of Montreal and the University of Florida took third.
Laura Hoover went to the Steel Bridge team practice as it prepared for the national competition.