Breaking Concrete

 Last Thursday, we finally load-tested our reinforced concrete beam! With apprehension, our group grabbed our beam, and prepared to put it under the machine that would press down on it until it broke.

Our beam is behind these two beams - we had to wait to grab it out, but it's there!

This is not our beam, but you can see the machine that tests the beams. Basically, it presses down on that little triangle, which presses down on the beam in turn.

Here is that beam after it broke.

This one is not our beam... :P

Aha! Here is our beam! I was pleased with our beam - it looked quite nice!

Testing the beam...

Another picture of the beam during testing.

And here is the broken beam - you can see the cracks just below the rectangle. It held 4,400 pounds of force, though! While we were not in the top three teams, we made a respectable showing of around 5th place out of 15ish teams. Besides, it was a ton of fun!

That's all for now!

Casey