Civil Engineering Students Win Geochallenge

March 12, 2008

On March 12, 2008, four civil engineering students won first place at the National Mechanically Stabilized Earth (MSE) Geochallenge competition in New Orleans. The team consisted of two doctoral  students, team captain Alsidqi Hasan and Rick Nugent, as well as two undergraduate students, Mark Korinek and Carrie Heffron.

The Geochallenge is held annually by the Geo Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) to encourage student participation in a conference called Geocongress. The competition involves creating an efficient retaining wall from paper that can contain a box of sand and a 50 pound surcharge.

Ten universities were selected to compete and implement their designs based on submitted design papers. The design papers consisted of design calculations and information based on laboratory experiments. The LSU team paper was selected as a top five design and earned a $2,000 travel grant for the competition.

Upon hearing that their design was chosen, the team began to practice implementing their design at least twice a week for a month and a half. They made certain that the design would hold and was as efficient as possible. While it held up in competition, team members noted that was not always the case in practice. However, the practice seemed to pay off in the end.

“It’s really all about satisfaction. We sacrificed a lot of time and the work paid off to represent the university so well, especially with this being our first time,” Hasan said.

Of the ten competing universities, the only other to have a project that upheld the challenge was Drexel University. However, the LSU team had the more efficient design, which used less paper, and took the trophy from two-time defending champions from the University of Missouri.

Article by Lee Jeffrey for the College of Engineering, 225-578-5706, mlavall@lsu.edu

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