Author: Angela Keranen

The Michigan Tech Concrete Canoe Team placed first at the North-Central regional concrete canoe competition held at Lawrence Tech last weekend.  The 35-member team swept the competition in all four categories:

•  Technical Paper: The team writes a professional quality design paper detailing the engineering that went into designing our concrete mix proportions, hull design, management techniques, testing procedures, and construction methods.
• Technical Presentation: A group of presenters summarize the Technical Paper into presentation which can be no longer than 5 minutes. The challenge is to condense an entire year of work into a concise and dynamic presentation.
• Races: There are 5 races: 2 person Women’s Sprint, 2 person Men’s Sprint, 2 person Women’s Endurance, 2 person Men’s Endurance, and a 4 person Coed Sprint. Michigan Tech has traditionally excelled in the Race Category and successfully defended all 5 Regional race titles.
• Final Product: The canoe is displayed and judged for aesthetics and compliance with official rules of competition which detail dimensions and materials used in construction.

The team will now move on to the national competition to be held June 17 – 19, 2017 at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, CO.

The Michigan Tech Steel Bridge Team also placed first overall at the 2017 North Central Regional Competition.  They also placed first in three out of the six subcategories including: weight, stiffness, and efficiency.  The goal of the competition is to design a 20′ long bridge that optimizes weight, constructability, and deflection under a 2500 lb load. The team will now be headed to Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon to compete in the National Student Steel Bridge competition in May.

ASCE and the American Institute of Steel Construction co-sponsor the national competition, which began in 1992 at Michigan Tech University.

Congratulations to both teams on a fantastic job and good luck at the National Competition!

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program funds undergraduate students to conduct research under the guidance of a Michigan Tech faculty member.  Darian Reed, an undergraduate student in Civil Engineering, has been chosen as a 2017 SURF Award recipient.  He will be working with Dr. Pasi Lautala.

Evaluation of Methods to Record Head Orientation in Driving Simulator and In-Vehicle Study Environments

This project concentrates on two aspects; development of a naturally wearable head orientation sensing device using Arduino™ hardware, and development of a methodology that allows a scientifically validated comparison and interpretation of head orientation measurements in both environments. This project is a continuation of the research Aaron Dean performed in his 2016 SURF. It will benefit the outcomes of the current projects such as the current large-scale behavioral study of driver behavior at highway-rail grade crossings that Dr. Pasi Lautala and Dr. Myounghoon Jeon are currently working on . The research uses data from the 2nd Strategic Highway Research Program Naturalistic Driving Study (SHRP2), but will also allow us to make conclusions on the similarity of head orientation measurements in naturalistic and simulated environments. Overall, the results should allow us to improve the accuracy of modeling driver behavior using driving simulators. In addition, it will standardize the data collection platform in future projects, such as expansion of our current study to naturalistic (real-life) environment and other studies requiring a rotational head tracking component.