Abstract
The Vanderbilt Concrete Canoe (VCC) Team has a competitive history at the Southeastern Regional ASCE Conference, placing in the top five schools throughout the past three years. The most recent concrete canoe project was named The Little Engine That Canoed in 2006 to honor Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt’s origins in the railroad industry and as a reminder of the power of persistence. Developing The Little Engine was a small portion of the overall project objectives. The design team first compiled a significant body of literature that systematically outlined the steps for a successful concrete canoe project. The Little Engine boasts a fresh hull, three-dimensional finite element analysis, and an optimized concrete composite. The canoe construction efforts yielded a female mold, canoe carrier, and stands. Team members found the process of modeling the V-shaped bow and stern sections and a rounded stern stem to be the most challenging obstacles. Three-dimensional analysis was performed for the first time in school history and provided insight into graduate level coursework. Similarly, designing a concrete composite to withstand the rigors of competition required the use of a polymer to replace water in the concrete mix. To reach new heights, the team utilized a functional breakdown structure. Teamwork and communication, in the face of limited manpower, resulted in performing over 800 man-hours of concrete canoe related activities during a two-year period.Copyright for articles published in this journal is retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to Vanderbilt Undergraduate Research Journal under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (linked here). By virtue of their appearance in this open access journal, articles are available for wide dissemination at no cost to readers, with proper attribution (acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal), in educational and other non-commercial settings. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process.
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