By Alexander Gilbert
On the weekend of Saturday, April 20, Western New England University’s student steel bridge team traveled to the University of New Hampshire to compete in the 2024 Annual Regional Student Steel Bridge Competition. At the competition, the student engineers presented and constructed their bridge design, facing off against 13 other universities from the Northeast region, including two Canadian teams.
The competition requires each team to design and fabricate a bridge, constructed only out of steel, that fits within the many specifications in the competition rulebook. This year’s guidelines required the bridge to stand lower than two feet tall and composed of steel members that were no longer than three feet and six inches. Western New England University’s bridge design consisted of around 50 steel members that were bolted together using nuts and bolts during the competition.
The steel bridge team succeeded greatly at the regional competition, withstanding the 2500 lb load test with a minimal deflection of 1.4 inches and constructing the bridge under the 30-minute time limit. Although the team didn’t place in the top three to qualify for nationals, the team took home a first-place award for aesthetics, which includes the overall bridge design and poster presentation.
Keara Mooney, a senior civil engineering student, is the current president of the team and has been a part of the steel bridge team for all three years of her college experience. Mooney’s journey on the steel bridge team has been full of highs and lows, from the team’s bridge being disqualified at the 2022 regional competition at the University of Connecticut to advancing to the 2023 national student steel bridge competition at the University of California San Diego last year.
This year, Mooney and the rest of the steel bridge team were hard at work designing, welding, and constructing the 2024 model of the bridge. As the competition has different design constraints every year, the steel bridge team has to design an entirely new bridge every school year. The bridge takes the entire school year to construct, with the design process occurring in the fall and the fabrication of the steel members beginning in the spring semester.
Mooney is passionate about the year-long project, recognizing it as a “fantastic opportunity for students to use what they are learning in class” and work as a team to complete a project. Students on the steel bridge team learn and apply many skills, including regularly using a 3D modeling software called Solidworks, using lab equipment such as the circular saw and the belt sander, and using the welder to weld the bridge pieces together.
Mooney explained, “personally it has taught me so much about what welding does to metals, how to design stronger joints, how to analyze forces on a complicated design, and the biggest one of all, how to problem solve!”
The steel bridge team is a place for all civil engineers who are driven to succeed and educate themselves outside of class. Will Shtefan, a junior civil engineering major, was a part of the steel bridge team for the first time this year and was enthusiastic to compete and fabricate the bridge.
At 6:30 a.m., Shtefan, Mooney, and the seven other students on the team arrived at the Whittemore Center Arena at UNH, where the competition was being held. As Western New England University didn’t compete until 11:30 a.m., the team had a lot of time to network with students from other universities and mentally prepare their build time. Shtefan explains that “leading up to the competition, being in the arena, I was just insanely stressed,” saying that “I didn’t know what was going to happen and how we would perform.”
During the building portion of the competition, teams have to assemble their bridge together using connections of nuts and bolts under a brief time limit of thirty minutes. Throughout construction, builders must follow strict guidelines, such as receiving scoring penalties if they step outside a certain zone or drop any component of the bridge, a nut, or bolt on the ground. This means that a team member has to physically support the bridge in the air before the bridge is connected enough to stand on its own.
Shtefan described that “when you’re anxious, everything seems so loud and big but when the timer started, I locked in and all the noise went away.” Shtefan, Mooney, and the four other builders constructed Western New England University’s steel bridge in roughly 26 minutes, clearing the 30-minute time restraint.
The week leading up to the competition was extremely tough for all members on the team, but the drive to succeed brought everyone closer together. “Oh my god, it was insanely stressful. It was a lot of long hours and a lot of adjustments that we needed to make,” Shtefan explained, describing the pressure felt in the week prior to the competition.
Two days before the competition, the team stayed in the lab past midnight, modifying the bridge to include a tension member that spanned the width of the bridge. The night before the competition, the entire team of nine students stayed in Sleith past two in the morning practicing the construction of the bridge, to ensure the construction time stayed within 30 minutes. The six builders were cheered on by the other team members, who picked out songs, and kept record of the time and building strategies.
The long nights working hard on the bridge turned the steel bridge team from a team of students into a tight-knit family. Shetfan recounts, “Those were some of the best nights I’ve ever had in college,” and “it really started to become like a family, not just a club.” As all members of the team began putting their all into the bridge construction and cheering each other on, the long hours working began to feel like fun hours hanging out with your friends.
As the spring 2024 semester comes to a close, the steel bridge team is bracing to say goodbye to their senior members Keara Mooney and Owen Feindel, who have both been a strong part of the team for the last three school years.
“I am definitely going to miss the steel bridge team,” Mooney said, even after spending numerous hours in the lab everyday designing, assisting with welding, grinding the steel members to fit easier, and handling competition registration paperwork. She explained that “as hard as it was to work all of those long hours, on top of schoolwork and studying, the outcome has always been worth it.”
Mooney added that she has come back year after year for the sense of community and dedication to civil engineering, saying the “steel bridge team has created a family for me and life-long friendships. I am grateful for everyone on the team.”
