BY ANNA ZALAKOSTAS

In print | April 10, 2008

Entering Swarthmore in the Steel Bridge Competition, an annual competition amongst college engineering students to build the best bridge, for the first time, a team of ten Swarthmore students including David Bober ’09, Travis Rothbloom ’10, Karina Navarro ’09, Tom Kelleher ’09, Rachel Cohen ’10, Kara Peterman ’09, Susan Willis ’09 and Meghan Whalen ’10 that was led by Chris Caruso ’08 and Sam Garcia ’08 placed fourth among nine schools at the American Society of Civil Engineers conference at Lafayette College last weekend.

Though Swarthmore students have attended the ASCE Conference in the past, it was not until this year that Caruso and Garcia took the initiative to enter Swarthmore in the Steel Bridge Competition, one of the two competitions held at the weekend event. According to Caruso, the decision to compete was a combination of interest sparked by seeing the bridges other schools had built at last year’s regional conference, the awareness of the necessity to complete a senior thesis (Caruso and Garcia designed the bridge for their final E90 project), and the desire to increase Swarthmore’s visibility at a conference that is for the most part dominated by larger universities. “We wanted to get Swarthmore, which is a small school compared to the other schools in the competition, more involved. We wanted to get this competition to be a yearly thing for our chapter. There has to be a groundbreaking year where all the kinks get worked out, so we thought what better than to use a huge E90 project to get people out there excited,” Caruso said.

Though Swarthmore finished in fourth place, the team still came out strong. “For a debut year, it was good,” Caruso said. “Especially considering there are pages and pages of rules you have to follow. We designed a good bridge. Because it was part of our E90 project, our professor had additional expectations on top of what the competition requires, so our bridge had to satisfy both the competition’s criteria and our advisor’s criteria.”

The teams competing are judged on four criteria: weight, aesthetic, stiffness and efficiency. Every part of the bridge is given a monetary value, and, ultimately, the challenge comes down to being able to build the best bridge using the least amount of money. “You don’t just have to design a good bridge, you have to design a good bridge for the competition,” Cohen added. “You need to be able to put it together quickly and easily. Because all our connections were bolted, it took a while to get the bolts in, whereas the other teams who had more experience had pieces that fit together.”

The bridge, designed by Caruso and Garcia in January, was based off of the triangular arrangement of beams, called roof trusts, found in sloped roof buildings like ski lofts. According to the rules of the competition, the actual building of the bridge requires that only two people stand in an area that represents the river, who can’t step beyond a certain point. Similarly, those standing outside of the river are unable to go past a certain point into the river, so the speed of construction largely depends on smooth cooperation and the assistance of a supervisor, who helps by shouting out instructions to those involved in different parts of the assembly process.

“I really had a lot of fun,” Cohen said. “It’s incredibly nerdy, but it’s great. On the first day when everyone is assembling their bridges, you can walk around with your teammates and examine all the different designs and try to analyze bridges and why teams designed their bridges the way they did or try to predict how it’s going to do in the competition. For folks like engineers, that’s a fiekd day.”

After this year’s positive experience at the ASCE conference, Swarthmore is planning on entering the Steel Bridge Competition again next year. The students involved in building the bridge expect that they can be even more competitive next year and that they will be able to put in an even better showing: “We learned so much from doing this. We didn’t really know what we were getting into,” Cohen said.

“If we had to build a competitive bridge again, we’d do it differently,” Caruso added. “You need a bridge that’s light, you need to have a few pieces that go together quickly, and you need a bridge that’s stiff. While we knew all of that before, what we really learned is that you have to keep all of these objectives simultaneously in mind from day one.”

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