{"id":17973,"date":"2023-11-02T14:31:56","date_gmt":"2023-11-02T18:31:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/outreach\/news\/mission-impastable-student-engineers-put-spaghetti-structures-to-test\/"},"modified":"2023-11-06T10:22:51","modified_gmt":"2023-11-06T15:22:51","slug":"mission-impastable-student-engineers-put-spaghetti-structures-to-test","status":"publish","type":"news","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/outreach\/news\/mission-impastable-student-engineers-put-spaghetti-structures-to-test\/","title":{"rendered":"Mission Impastable: Student Engineers Put Spaghetti Structures to the Test"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article originally appeared on The Hub.<\/a><\/p>\n

More than 150 high school students from across the country and from locations around the world gathered at Johns Hopkins University\u2019s Homewood campus on Friday to test their bridge structures, made entirely out of spaghetti and epoxy.<\/p>\n

The event is the final challenge of the four-week Engineering Innovation program, an immersive, pre-college summer experience offered through JHU\u2019s Whiting School of Engineering.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom an academic standpoint, this event marks the culmination of your Engineering Innovations studies, and that alone makes it worth celebrating,\u201d said Ed Schlesinger, dean of the Whiting School, during his opening remarks. \u201cThis is no small feat. \u2026 The world needs creative, talented, innovative problem-solvers.\u201d<\/p>\n

More than 40 teams competed under names featuring spectacular pasta puns, including \u201cThe Spaghettysburg Address,\u201d \u201cThe Ramen Emperors,\u201d and \u201cSpaghett About It.\u201d<\/p>\n

Their construction strategies often followed a similar theme.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe decided to do a bridge that had an arch,\u201d said Jasmin Thames, who will be a senior at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute in the fall. She competed with team Spaghetti Yetis. \u201cArches were a common theme, but there were different configurations in the middle of the bridge to set them apart.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some teams opted for heft, building bridges that were heavily reinforced\u2014despite the penalty they would face for having an overweight bridge. Others opted for a strategy of placing the weights\u2014which dangled below each structure from an eye hook screwed into the center\u2014as nimbly as possible.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe thing about spaghetti is that it can\u2019t hold shock, so you have to place the weights very carefully because it might break with, say, five kilograms of shock, and we try to maximize the weight it can hold by placing it slowly, slowly,\u201d said Giovanni Ferioli, a rising senior from Miami, Florida, who competed on team Pasta la Vista A. \u201cWe tested our bridge before, we had three rough drafts, and we realized that between the first and the second that we can\u2019t just place the weight, because it breaks from shock before it breaks from the weight it can hold.\u201d<\/p>\n

Others knew they were doomed from the start.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur bridge broke under the weight of the chain,\u201d said Will Zhu, a rising junior from Los Angeles, California, who competed on team The Impastables. \u201cI think the epoxy was denatured on one of the joists, because it didn\u2019t adhere to itself even after we cured it for three days. We saw it was breaking when we tested it this morning. But personally, my goal for this project was to make something that looked cool, and we did that, so it\u2019s a success.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had that problem, too, where the epoxy wasn\u2019t completely dry,\u201d added Omar Geier, a rising senior from Dubai whose team name was Endless Pastabilities. \u201cOur main problem is that we focused too much on the trusses and not the actual loading platform. That\u2019s what broke for us, because we didn\u2019t spend enough time on it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The teams that fared the best in the Homewood competition were:<\/p>\n