A Race to Innovate

The annual Concrete Canoe Competition, which is co-sponsored by the ASCE and Cleveland-based Master Builders, fosters several engineering breakthroughs that are ignored or forgotten by the engineering industry. In building the canoe that won this year’s competition, the University of Alabama at Huntsville, discovered the construction and design of unique light-weight, thin-walled reinforced concrete composite section that can be used to build infrastructure, affordable housing or space crafts. The panels consist of flexible, lightweight concrete between two layers of steel mesh and a geotechnical grid.