Lessons from the 2014 Steel Bridge Conference

This past weekend, the Ohio Valley Student Conference took place. UofL attended, competing with their 2014 bridge design. Each year, ASCE and AISC write rules to introduce the students to unprecedented challenges. That was no less true this year!

At the competition, 8 out of 12 bridges either disqualified or failed during loading. That is not an usual thing! If nothing else, this proves the challenges of this year’s rules. Unfortunately, UofL was one of those teams; you can’t win every time.

This year’s bridge had a dimensional disqualification which was unforeseen, as it only occurred when fully constructed. This is a great lesson for all engineers: it might work out on paper, but in real practice it can be a totally different story.

On a happier note, the UofL team had one of the quickest bridge construction times, and that is an impressive feat! The team has learned a lot from this year’s competition and is excited to bounce back next year!

Out of Our Element: Louisville Baja’s experience in Quebec

Winter 2014 in Louisville has been pretty rough compared to recent years; sub-zero temperatures, several inches of snow, and plenty of snow days and delayed schedule days on campus.  While in Canada, we accumulated more snow in 24 hours (the 72nd consecutive day of snowfall in Quebec) than we had in Louisville this winter!  Walking track to track on dynamic day usually meant sinking into waist deep snow at least once or twice and the tracks were not marked with cones but were just carved out of the snow that had accumulated over the past 72 days.  Travelling from Montreal to Quebec City was interesting as we were the only team to attend that did not own a set of snow tires for their truck.  We were clearly “Out of Our Element.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_blNOfqe2ac

CCDC moves on to Chicago!

This past Saturday, Feb. 15, the UofL Cyber Defense team competed in their State Qualifier against NKU and Murray State. In 8 straight hours of competition consisting of systems auditing, systems administration, network monitoring, intrusion detection, and service uptime, the team came out on top in not only the state, but in the entire qualifier where teams in both Kentucky and Ohio competed to move on for their respective states. The Midwest Regional competition is being held March 28-29 in Chicago.

Louisville Baja heads north!

Fabrication time!

The Steel Bridge Team at U of L is excited to be in the fabrication phase of the project. The ECTC workshop is working hard to deliver a quality bridge, and the team is thrilled to see their design come to life.

In the coming weeks, the team will be perfecting the bridge’s construction time. There will soon be tryouts for team builders, who will represent our school at the regional (and hopefully national) level! If you are interested in being a builder, email us at SteelBridge.UofL@gmail.com.

Submitting the Final Bridge Design

This week, the U of L Steel Bridge team submitted their final bridge design to the fabrication students at Elizabethtown Community & Technical College! The team is very excited to move forward; they are now working on completing the shop drawings for the folks at ECTC. Additionally, they plan to work with the CAD department at ECTC, so that all students involved can truly benefit from this collaborative process. Many thanks to the ECTC faculty for continuing to make this happen! The Steel Bridge Team looks forward to seeing their project come to life!

Completing the Design Phase

The Steel Bridge Design Team is completing their design, which is within the goal of completing the design this semester! This is a great step forward for the new team. The next step will be to order materials; namely, steel!

Like last year, the team will be working with welders and fabricators from the Elizabethtown Community and Technical College. The faculty and students from Elizabethtown will have ongoing communications with the UofL students, and it will work very much like a real engineering project. The groups will exchange Autocad drawings, mark up the drawings, communicate about improvements and any issues in fabrication, and much more. This provides a great experience for both groups, especially the engineering students from UofL, because they’re getting real life project management experience!

Many thanks to the guys at E-town for helping the team out again this year. Stay tuned for more updates on bridge fabrication, as the team watches their new project come to life!

Cyber Defense Update

Cyber defense has had some successful runs since the last update. University of Louisville won the CSSIA CyberWars competition on October 12. CyberWars is a hybrid competition that involves having to defend the same services as in other competitions (web, email, dns, etc.) while also having Kali and Backtrack Linux Virtual Machines to attack other teams with. The rules are less strict than with Cyber Defense, and virtually anything goes — needless to say, it was nice being the only team with working e-com all day. The team also won the latest CCDC Invitational, beating West Coast schools such as UC Berkeley.

The group is preparing for upcoming events as well. We will host an internal Cyber Defense Exercise next week, and will also be assisting with a competition for the CIS Department‘s network security course in December. The CIS competition will be run by Dr. Im and will include over 30 student defenders competing against industry and government professionals. This competition will be much more intense than the one last year, and everyone is excited for it.

At our weekly meetings, we have continued doing talks and training for all participants. Recent topics have included common vulnerabilities, access control, and cryptographic primitives. Our weekly meetings will conclude next week with the exercise, and we will pick up again next semester with more advanced topics.

Perfecting the 2014 Steel Bridge Design

The Steel Bridge Team is hard at work on the 2014 bridge design. Each year, the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) present new and unique challenges in the competition rules. This year, there is a heavy constraint on the depth of the bridge. As you can imagine, this rule makes it difficult to design a stiff bridge.

With this new challenge in mind, the steel bridge team is working hard to find creative ways to make a strong, efficient bridge. Connections must be very snug, without taking forever to fasten; the final product should be practical to put together. All of these details must be considered at the very beginning design stages.

The design is moving along well, and the team is very excited to begin fabrication in January.

Louisville SAE Baja Wins Again!

Chris Barnett (Sophomore) taking the 2011 car to the checkered flag in the final hour of the race.

On September 28th, sixty cars representing twenty-four universities lined up for the start of the fifth installment of Louisville SAE Baja’s Midnight Mayhem! This unofficial SAE Baja endurance race takes place in late September every year as an event to help team recruit and retain new members and also provide a much more laid back competition environment to come out and have fun racing the cars that they’ve all spent countless hours designing and building. Since 2008, the event has grown each year and has now become the premier off season event for teams to attend! The event is held at Podium 1 Motoplex in Charlestown, Indiana where during the day, dynamic events are held to test individual aspects of the cars and then at 8:00 PM the four hour endurance race begins under the lights!

The University of Louisville fielded three cars this year hoping to sweep the podium and place first, second, and third. During the day, the 2013 and 2011 cars were very productive placing 1st and 2nd in the drivetrain event and 2nd and 3rd in the maneuverability event!

Nicholas Day (Senior) completing the drivetrain event with a first place time!

Just before 8:00, the cars lined up at the starting line, four rows of fifteen cars, for the land rush style start. The 2011 and 2013 Louisville cars gridded in the front row ready to lead the field onto the circuit. When the green flag waved, the 2013 car quickly jumped to the front and never looked back! After one lap, a ten second gap between first and second had been made. As the race went on the field thinned but, for Louisville the 2011 and 2013 cars were in 1st and 3rd place with McGill University in 2nd. As the race drew to a close, McGill had drivetrain issues bumping the 2011 car up to 2nd place! Once again, the University of Louisville took home the victory an astounding six laps ahead of 2nd place, the 2011 UofL car! Ohio State University took home third place.

Cody Ewing (Freshmen) driving the 2012 car in the final hour of the race.

For pictures and information on Midnight Mayhem please visit our Midnight Mayhem Facebook Page!