Joshua Baggett, freshman in Electrical Engineering, was a man on a mission as he ventured a little out of his discipline recently. His goal was to win the grand prize, an iPOD, in the Balsa Design Competition of the Engineering Open House hosted by UT's Biosystems Engineering and Environmental Science department. Friends said Joshua had planned on winning for the past week; he admits to telling himself that he would either win, or buy his own iPOD!
Thirty-five students from the Engineering Fundamentals program took part in the competition, department tours, and a pizza party. Each student was allowed twenty minutes to build a structure of balsa and superglue designed to protect a ping-pong ball from a crushing weight. In the event of wayward superglue, assistance was available to peel participants from their workstations.
The actual competition "crush-off" featured a dizzying variety of designs, from seat-of-the-pants boxy structures using a contestant's entire allotment of balsa, to sparse, ultralight frames built from carefully-scaled drawings. Each design was compressed in a testing machine that gradually increased the weight until failure occurred. The crush-off was conducted in a nearby engineering lab, and webcast to the pizza party. In addition to the iPOD, various cash prizes were awarded.
For the record, Joshua won. His design achieved a strength-to-weight ratio of almost 17,000 using a well-built tetrahedron structure (roughly equivalent to a small boat trailer supporting a navy destroyer).
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