Mexican students design low-cost bridge for floods

The Kokún team was the winner of a contest for the construction of a light bridge at the Faculty of Civil Engineering under the Universidad Veracruzana , easy to assemble, and meant to help people in flooded areas.

The students Angel Daniel Arias, Daniel Santiago Méndez, Diana Isabel Huesca, Angélica María Olmedo, and Roberto Antonio Landa presented the proposal of a bridge that resists a weight of more than 90 kilograms , with an estimate cost of 600 pesos .

It was a wooden bridge fixed by screws, with a weight of eight kilograms , 29.16 cubic centimeters in volume , and an average assembly time of 11 minutes .

"I was inspired by two things: Bridges that were used in the First and Second World War , and in folding tables; that's where the inspiration came from, after which we worked on pencil ideas and the bridge dimensions,” explained Roberto Antonio Landa López .

Six teams

participated in the competition organized by the academic Rabindranarth Romero López , who teaches Basic Hydraulics . Romero López raised a scenario of a flood to test the participants’ bridges.

"What we want is for students to apply the knowledge they learn in the Faculty and relate it to another type of knowledge through a comprehensive and playful project," he said on the University's website.

The jury composed of professors from other areas evaluated three parameters: volume, weight, and assembly time .

The students showed the placement of the supports for the bridges with an intermediate distance of three meters; the weighing of the bridges and the measurement of their volume, as well as their assembly process. In the final part of the test, members of the team had to cross it.

Guillermo Fox Rivera, an academic who teaches Physics and Geometry

, said that in this type of contests creativity comes to light, which is a very important trait in engineering.

"On the other hand, they are reminded that when they graduate they will have to solve problems that are not based on a studied model, but on what they will have to solve without necessarily having all the necessary resources at hand ," he said.

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