2011 Student Competition on Cold-Formed Steel Design

Award Announcement
August 27, 2011

Results:

The 2011 Student Competition on Cold-Formed Steel Design has received a total of 78 entries from 9 universities located in 5 different countries.

The 9 universities are

  • University of North Texas, USA
  • Virginia Tech, USA
  • Johns Hopkins University, USA
  • Tongji University, China
  • Beijing University of Technology, China
  • Kocaeli University, Turkey
  • University of Science and Technology of Suzhou, China
  • Queensland University of Technology, Australia
  • University of Waterloo, Canada
     

We thank all the participating students and their faculty advisors for making the first CFS Design Student Competition a truly successful one.

The judge panel carefully reviewed all entries and ranked them according to the design's efficiency and constructability as well as the quality of the essay.

The top 3 designs are the following.

Rank

Name

School

Design

Elastic buckling load

1st

Jiazhen Leng

Johns Hopkins University

Design 1

85.25 kips

2nd

David Cross

Virginia Tech

Design 2

74.62 kips

3rd

Michael Palles IV

Virginia Tech

Design 3

72.67 kips

 

The other top 10 students are:

  • Mike Woodworth, Virginia Tech
  • Katie Masoero, Virginia Tech
  • Adrian Lorenzoni, Virginia Tech
  • Jeena Jayamon, Virginia Tech
  • Yifan Wang, University of Science and Technology of Suzhou
  • Kyle Kearsley, Virginia Tech
  • Roger Rovira, University of North Texas

Awards:

The top 3 students will receive an award plaque by mail.
All top 10 students will received a one-year CFSEI student membership ( www.cfsei.org ).

We sincerely appreciate the supports and advices from the sponsors and many individuals. We look forward to holding the competition in 2012. If you have any ideas, suggestions, or comments for this student competition, please send us emails at  CFS_Competition@unt.edu or use the mailing address listed at the bottom of this page.

 

Original Announcement
April 4, 2011

Mission:

The mission of the Student Competition on Cold-Formed Steel Design (CFS Design Student Competition) is to promote higher education in cold-formed steel structural design and to encourage students to use creative thinking skills to solve engineering problems.

Sponsors:

University of North Texas,  www.unt.edu
National Science Foundation,  www.nsf.gov
American Iron and Steel Institute,  www.steel.org
Cold-Formed Steel Engineers Institute, www.cfsei.org 

Eligibility:

The 2011 CFS Design Competition is open to all individual students. All levels of students (graduate students or lower levels, currently enrolled as a full-time student) are encouraged to participate in this competition. All student entrants are required to work on the challenge individually, and no team solutions are accepted.

2011 Competition Organizer:

Dr. Cheng Yu, Assistant Professor, University of North Texas

Judge Panel:

Cheng Yu, PhD, Assistant Professor, University of North Texas
Cristopher Moen, PhD, PE, Assistant Professor, Virginia Tech
Rick Haws, P.E., Technical Service Manager, Nuconsteel, A Nucor Company
Tim Bell, Branch Engineer, Simpson Strong-Tie
Ken Stout, Automated Framing Systems Customer Service, Training, and Support Supervisor, Nuconsteel, a Nucor Company

Schedule:

April 4, 2011     Competition starts, the design challenge is announced.
May 31, 2011    Submission deadline. All submissions shall be received electrically before 6:00 pm U.S. central time.
June 2011         Winners chosen by the design judge panel.
July 2011          Award plaques mailed to winning students.
August 2011      Competition summary published on website.

Awards:

Each of the top three winning students will receive an Award Plaque.

The Winning submissions will be recognized and exhibited at appropriate platforms such as professional conferences and news releases as well as published on the competition website.

The 2011 Design Challenge:

 

Goal

To design a optimal cold-formed steel cross-section shape. The optimal shape shall yield an as high as possible critical elastic buckling load for half-wave lengths equal to or less than 12 inches when uniform compression stresses are applied.

Given/Assumptions

  1.  The cross-section shape shall be a open section.
  2.  The total length of the cross section shall be 8.727 inches.
  3.  The thickness of the steel is 0.0451 inches.
  4.  Cold-formed steel properties: Elastic modulus = 29500 ksi, Possion's ratio = 0.3.
  5.  Shape corners (zero radius) are assumed.
  6.  Unit system: both U.S. customary system and the International system (SI) are accepted.

Tool

Use an open source software CUFSM to perform the elastic buckling analysis. CUFSM 3.12 can be downloaded here. More information about the software can be found in this link.

Tutorial and Example:

The competition is about creating optimal shapes under certain restrictions. Students with any background should be able to come up with a design and go through the analysis procedure to obtain the critical elastic buckling load in CUFSM.

What you really need to do is to define a cross-section shape and follow the procedure described in the example to determine the critical elastic buckling load. Repeat the steps to figure out the optimal cross-section shape.

Q and A:

1. The CUFSM only takes two decimals for coordinate inputs but my design has many small elements which need at least four decimals for the node coordinates.

Solution: Use '1/100 inch' as the length unit so that you can adopt more decimals for the coordinates.

Online Project Submission:

Entries must be submitted via email to CFS_Competition@unt.edu by 6:00pm, U.S. Central Time, on May 31, 2011. A final submission must contain the following three documents:

  • Completed submission information form.
  • A Design Essay (in Word or PDF).
  • The CUFSM result file (mat file).

Combine all three files to a single zip file and email the zip file to CFS_Competition@unt.edu

The name of the zip file shall be in the format: first name_last name.zip

Design Essay:

A brief essay (in English), limited to 500 words and 3 letter-size pages, is required as part of the submission describing the concept of the design and the design solution.

Evaluation Criteria:

Only completed submissions will be evaluated and eligible for awards. The primary consideration will be given to the effectiveness of the cross-section shape (the higher critical elastic buckling load the better). Secondary consideration will be given to the quality of the design essay.

What is Cold-Formed Steel?

Cold-formed steel - Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_formed_steel

CCFSS Cold-Formed Steel for Students. http://www.ccfssonline.org/Student/Student.html

For More Information:

Additional questions on the competition subject, CUFSM software, and submissions should be addressed to:

Cheng Yu, Assistant Professor
University of North Texas
3940 E. Elm St., Suite F115
Denton, TX 76207
Tel: 940.565.2022
Fax: 940.565.2666
e-mail: CFS_Competition@unt.edu

Acknowledgment:

The organizer would like to thank the Sponsors and the Judge Panel for their funding supports and technical advises. Special thanks go to Dr. Ben Schafer at the Johns Hopkins University who provides the CUFSM software for this event.