The concrete canoe or boat competition is generally organized by ASCE(American society of civil engineer).Only those students take part in these competition whose college has recognised asce student group or chapter. These competition not only test your technical knowledge but as well as your strength,speaking and presenting skills.
Design: These competition is divided into 4 parts- Oral presentation,Design paper, Races and Final product.
Firstly design of canoe should be made virtually by using software like 3d max, or staad pro etc with its structural analysis to get shape and size of canoe such that it bears all the compressive forces etc. The size of hull will also be determine.While designing all factor like skin drag force striked paddle impact on canoe.weight of persons etc should be taken into account.
We have to kept these above things into mind while designing the canoe.The canoe should be durable and light weight. For these we have to design concrete which has following properties :
- Light weight
- Low permeability
- Good workability
- High tensile and compressive strength
- High modulus of elasticity
We can use concrete mix design 1,2,3B,3G,5. Generally students select design according to requirement and then perform various test and redesign the concrete until they get concrete of desirable properties.
We can use fibre of two different sizes one size <5mm and second size>5mm. Micro fibre prevent the formation of cracks and macro fibre prevent the increasing the size of formed cracks.These fibre could be carbon fibre, glass fibre,steel or other material fibre. We can also use polystrene beads as aggregate in concrete.It is observed that by adding 1% of fibre ductility increases by 12% and hardness by 300%.
METHOD:The compaction of concrete is required. We should select that method which also help in compaction.Guniting or shortcrete is used. In these method concrete is sprayed at high speed with the help of compressed air.Many teams used these method.They used to lay concrete in forms of layers. The sprayer should be 50 to 100 cm away from the mould and pressure should lies between 45 to 85psi.
The both can use both models-male or female mould .But male mould is better because it is easy to give finishing to canoe from outside by use of sand paper.
FINISHING PRODUCT: The finshing of boat is also matter for scoring. For these purpose we can use sand paper of different grits sizes. If there is excess of concrete we can use sand paper of small grit while to get poper and smooth finish we should sand paper whose grit number is large with lot of water.
It is really a good opportunity for student to explore themselves.
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