The San Diego State student chapter of the professional organization California Technical Engineering Association aims to improve the practice of and promote the field of geotechnical engineering at SDSU. The team consists of five engineering majors who recently competed in the GeoWall national championship held in San Antonio on March 18. The event was organized by the American Society of Civil Engineers as part of the International Foundations Congress and Equipment Expo.
The competition required the team members to build a three-sided wall inside of a sand box using kraft paper and packaging tape within 50 minutes. The goal was optimization — if the reinforcement was done well and the compaction of the sand was good, the solid wall was removed and everything remained intact.
Civil engineering senior Emerson Revolorio is the co-designer of the GeoWall.
“The whole point of this competition is to use our design and skill to hold 400 pounds of sand with just poster board,” Revolorio said.
This is SDSU’s first time in the national competition. In order to get into nationals, the team had to submit a report to the ASCE Geo-Institute. The report included the design and analysis that went into the team’s wall. The report was judged by a panel of practicing engineers and professors, who named SDSU’s team number 17 in the competition based on that design.
Revolorio said the GeoWall team members have been working together for more than a year. They competed in the GeoWall regional conference competition last year. They participated in the extremely competitive Pacific Southwestern conference, against California State University, Fullerton, Cal Poly Pomona, University of California, Los Angeles and University of California, San Diego. Fullerton won the national competition last year, while Cal Poly Pomona has won multiple times in the past. After the competition, team captain Clayton Vogan decided to take their work to the next level for the national competition this year.
The rules were released in August and the team has been working on a new design ever since.
Civil engineering professor and interim department chair Janusz Supernak has attended 25 engineering competitions and mentioned past events, including a concrete canoe and a steel bridge. The GeoWall competition was added recently to incorporate geotechnical engineering.
“You wouldn’t like to have too much reinforcement because the more weight you have, the lower the score,” Supernak said. “At the same time, if you don’t have enough reinforcement, the wall will collapse.”
Supernak said the engineers have to make decisions about how to design the wall and where to put the reinforcements. All of the work is based very strongly on theory and the engineers’ knowledge.
“They need to know how forces are distributed. They need to know what is happening through statics and the geotechnical point of view,” he said.
Revolorio said that the competition was a learning experience.
“When it comes to calculations, a lot of people have taken math,” Revolorio said. “Then what we’re doing is also theory. We have the design and then we have the practicality of it.”
He said that one of the most important parts of the competition was being able to apply the lessons he has learned to real-world situations.
“We’re getting an experience we wouldn’t get in school,” Revolorio said.
