PSU Steel Bridge Team places 34th at national competition

The Portland State Steel Bridge Team placed 34th overall out of 45 teams at a national bridge-building competition last weekend after facing complications that affected their assembly time and bridge weight.

Teams entering the competition spend months designing and building their bridge, which is brought to the competition disassembled. The teams are then judged based on how quickly they can assemble their bridge and how much the structure bends when 2,500 pounds is added to it.

The 220-pound bridge, which the PSU team worked on from October to March, bent a total of one inch when weight was placed on it during the national competition. The competition took place during Saturday, May 25 and Sunday, May 26 in Los Angeles.

Team captain Andy Tibbitts and his teammates reached the national competition after taking first place at the Northwest Regional Steel Bridge competition in Fairbanks, Alaska in early April. Their bridge bent .85 inches at the regional competition.

The team assembled their bridge in 5 minutes, 20 seconds at the national competition, a full minute faster than their performance at the regional competition. However, it took an additional four and a half minutes to correct the problem they had with one of the structure’s bolts.

“We had some problems,” Tibbitts said. “One of the bolts got cross-threaded during competition and it took us a while to get it finished. In different categories we did better.”

The PSU team also suffered a rule infringement that added a penalty of 50 pounds to the weight of their bridge. Tibbitts said that the competition rules state that the team’s school name or abbreviation must be included somewhere on the bridge.

The team’s bridge had “Portland State” printed on it, which competition judges found unacceptable without “University” on it as well. Tibbitts said the team found this frustrating, and that nearly 10 other schools had the same problem.

“If everything went right at regionals, everything went wrong at nationals,” Tibbitts said. “We ran into a lot of problems. That was frustrating, especially knowing that we could have done a lot better.”

Tibbitts said improvements to the bridge and team assembly methods led to the team’s faster initial construction time at the national competition.

The team was able to remove four pieces from the structure, making the entire bridge 50 pounds lighter and easier to assemble, Tibbitts said. Eight bolted connections in the structure were removed, resulting in faster assembly of the bridge. A bolted connection threads two parts together using a threaded bolt and nut.

The team also had one less person to assemble the bridge in competition, leaving them with four team members instead of five.

Tibbitts said he originally joined the PSU team, which is made up of eight civil engineering students, because he wanted to take the principles and skills that he had learned in his engineering classes at PSU and apply them to a real-world experience building something.

Despite the downfalls in competition, he said he has enjoyed his time on the team in the past year.

“We had a great time,” Tibbitts said. “We had a wonderful team??great people, awesome to work with.”

One hundred eighty-seven schools from across the nation competed in the regional steel bridge building competition; 47 of the teams from the regional competition qualified for the national competition; 45 teams competed in the competition. The overall winner of the competition was North Dakota State University.

The American Society of Civil Engineers sponsors both the preliminary regional competitions and national competition each year. The PSU team will host the ASCE Northwest Regional Steel Bridge competition on campus next spring during the first week of April.