Engineers’ canoe kicks glass

March 9, 2009 by Jessica Walters 

Students use novel ideas in concrete boat competition

“Sink like a rock” means nothing to the UNLV American Society of Civil Engineers concrete canoe team.

The self-proclaimed nerds from ASCE have defied the laws of reason by creating a cement block that won’t sleep with the fishes.

“It’s extremely nerdy, we know, but we love it,” team captain Tiffany Hearn said.  

The team of civil engineering majors will be competing in the regional concrete canoe competition in Hawaii against 20 universities in April. 

The competition scores the teams in the categories of the aesthetics, technical presentation, technical paper and five races that are broken up between gender and length. 

The top three teams will advance to the national competition this June at the University of Alabama.

To qualify for the competition, the canoe must be submerged under water and come back up.

“This gets you used to the real world,” team member Adam Pocock said.  

“You understand the problems, you do the problems, you solve the problems but you don’t really understand what it means until you build something out of it.” 

The seven-member team has been designing the concrete canoe since late May 2008 and poured the final mold Feb. 25. 

Getting concrete to float is difficult enough without trying to make it fast.  The team went through much trial and error to discover a novel design that would rival those from the California schools.

“We basically made concrete lighter than water,” Hearn said.

Hearn said the team accomplished this by using chemicals to trap air in the concrete and by using glass instead of commonly used rocks.  They recycled glass from local bars to use in the construction and dubbed the canoe Kiss Our Glass.

Last year, the team did the best in UNLV history by coming in 11th place. 

“What we brought to the table was something new and innovative that they had never seen before, so it put us on the map,” co-captain Nicole Melton said.

The team’s goal was to improve their innovative mold by making it even lighter. The canoe weighs 54 pounds per cubic foot.  Water weighs 62.4 pounds per cubic foot.

The 20-foot-long canoe must also be sturdy enough to hold four paddlers and engineered well enough to have speed in the water.  There are separate male and female two-person sprint races, male and female three-person slalom races and a four-person co-ed race.

The team has put more than 500 hours into the project.  The teamwork has created a close bond of friendship among members. 

“I know a concrete canoe sounds silly,” Melton said, “but it really does take everyone putting everything into it.”

The team plans to use some of the recycled glass to create a mosaic spelling UNLV on the side of the canoe. Ninety-five percent of the products used to build the canoe are bio-based, making it as “green” as possible.

The team will test the black and red canoe in Lake Las Vegas on Saturday. The regional competition runs from April 1 to 4.