Two Rossin College teams participated in the Precast/Prestressed Concrete Institute’s 2020 Engineering Student Design Competition, with Lehigh University Team 2 placing third overall.
In PCI’s annual “Big Beam” competition, which marked its 20th year, students from various universities across the country, along with faculty advisors, compete in designing, building, and testing a 22-foot, precast concrete beam. This experience gives students a look into the precast concrete industry and provides the opportunity to work with local manufacturers.
Teams are judged on factors including the strength of the beam, quality of the report given on the beam, and the quality and creativity of analysis in the video and written entries. Winners of the 2020 competition were announced in October.
Lehigh Team 2 (Louis Linalso ’20 and current grad students Kinga Kuczynski ’20 and Logan King ’20) also won the Keith Kaufman Award for best written report. Lehigh Team 1 (Jackson Cooney ’20, Pawat Rithipreedanant ’20, and current grad student Rachel Hamburger ’20) was recognized with the award for best video.
Civil and environmental engineering professor and PCI Fellow Clay Naito was the advisor for both teams, with Northeast Prestressed Products (Cressona, Pa.) serving as their PCI producer partner.
“Student education and outreach are an important part of PCI’s programs,” said PCI president and CEO Bob Risser in a press release. “The students are quite literally our future as an industry. The hands-on nature of the Big Beam competition and familiarity with prestressed concrete will be invaluable to the participants as they proceed through their careers. I especially congratulate the winners and all the participants for being able to submit entries through the many challenges presented by COVID-19 this year.”
