2008 Woodie Awards
Club of the Week
The Making of a Concrete Canoe
Liz Urban
Issue date: 11/7/05 Section: Features
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Concrete Canoe is one of Clarkson University's many Student Projects for Engineering Experience and Design (SPEED) teams on campus. The name says it all - the team is involved in building a canoe out of light weight concrete and a mixture of different aggregates that allows the canoe to float and hold the rowers to be put into the competition!
A canoe made out of concrete is hardly completed over night. Throughout the year, students from every major come together to plan out the design of a new concrete canoe. Each year the rules and restrictions change, so the team must work out different concrete mix designs, hull designs for the canoe, and Finite Element Analyses (FEM) which are computer programs that model the canoe and can apply loads, then calculate stresses among other things. Unconventional light weight aggregates are used to help the canoe float because it allows it to be less dense than water. Having a good hull design is important because it needs to displace water correctly in order to have high buoyancy.
There is much more that goes into the construction of concrete that will float, but the important thing to know is that this SPEED team is not limited to just Civil Engineers. There are people currently on the team from all different majors: Electrical Engineers, Mechanical Engineers, Chemical Engineers, and many other types of Engineers at Clarkson.
Some SPEED teams make it difficult to participate your first time on the team because you need to have some experience and that is primarily due to the nature of SPEED teams.
"Concrete Canoe is very hands on for the average person," explained team member Adam Taddonio. It is a project that involves a lot of labor, and team captains encourage the inexperienced to help in the designing process as well as the construction throughout the year. It is very much a hands on experience and the more hands the easier their job is.