NJIT Steel Bridge Team

NJIT Steel Bridge Team is a team within the New Jersey Institute of Technology's ASCE chapter). It consists of undergraduate students who are attending at NJIT, majoring in civil engineering, and also members of ASCE. Every year, the team competes against other schools in a steel bridge competition.

Every year, the team has a few fund raising events, which are very crucial for the competition because the team needs to have proper finance in order to order parts and fabricate them. Besides fund raising, sponsors from other corporates and companies are very important too.

A lot of time the team members get together and have outside activities such as hiking, paint ball, go cart, or whatever anyone wants to do. The team also does many productive activities such as visiting high schools and talking about civil engineering and the steel bridge competition.

There is at least a meeting every week talking about the process of the team and keeping members informed. Meetings are always held during common hours. Sometimes pizzas and drinks are served.

The objective of the competition is to design a light bridge yet strong and economically and assembly it fast with as few team members as possible.

The competition has 3 processes: Design & testing, which students do that themselves using programs, knowledges they learned from classes, and sometimes help from professors and alumni; Fabrication, which is when students grind, weld, and fit the parts together; and finally Assembly, which is when students put the parts together to achieve the designed bridge.

There are 6 categories in scoring: Display (how the bridge look), construction speed (time management), construction economy (low cost to build), lightness, stiffness (aggregate deflection), and structural efficiency (a formula used to calculate this based on weight and deflection).

The competition occurs every year. It is hosted at different places every time. This year, 2008, the regional competition will be hosted at Polytechnic Institute of NYU, New York City, on Saturday April 4, 2009; and the national competition will be hosted at University of Nevada, Las Vegas on May 22 and May 23.

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