"Concrete canoes can float"

By Erin Tocknell
HERALD STAFF WRITER

The Daily Herald, Columbia, Tennessee
Friday, June 15, 2001

Santa Fe graduate helps UAH defend title.

Myia Redic (second from left) and other engineering students from the University of Alabama, Huntsville paddle to the finish of the co-ed sprint race, the finale of the 2000 American Society of Civil Engineers' National Concrete Canoe Championship.  Redic, a Santa Fe native, returned to the competition which began Thursday, in hopes of defending her national record. 

College is all about expanding boundaries and accepting ideas that once would have seemed outlandish or just plain impossible.

For example, Myia Redic graduated from Santa Fe High School five years ago, and she has since learned that concrete floats.  In fact, it makes a canoe fast enough to carry her and her University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) teammates to the Concrete Canoe National Championships in San Diego, Calif., this weekend.

"I thought they were joking," the 23-year-old said of the day a professor came to her class and invited people to join his concrete canoe team.  But that was about two years ago and since then Redic has helped build two concrete canoes and paddled her way to a national record, which she will defend Saturday.

Redic and her canoeing partner will compete against strong engineering schools like the University of California at Berkeley and Clemson, but she said UAH's 15 members are the team to beat.

"We're a four-time national champion, so it's pretty amazing," Redic said of her school.  "We are tied for the highest number of national championships that the (concrete canoe) organization has."

The competition itself is divided into two Parts -- Presentations and racing.  On Thursday, each team displayed its canoe and explained their design process to the judges.  

Saturday is race day.  Competitors race in pairs or fours, paddling 100 meters, making a 180-degree turn and paddling 100 meters back.  Unlike recreational canoeists, who sit in the boat, racers kneel.

"We can use more of our backs, and that allows us to get further in the water.  You have to learn to be very balanced," Redic said.

Because each team must design a new canoe every year, the competition process is year-round.  The secret to making concrete canoes float is mixing an aggregate other than rock with the cement.

 This year, UAH's team used "micro-balloons," which are tiny glass beads filled with air; and mixed them with regular Portland cement, latex, acrylic fortifier and water.  The end product is concrete so light that a solid block will float in water, and so flexible it can bend without breaking.

UAH professors and students are hailing the team's creation as the possible next wonder material of the space age.

"There's a really good chance these materials will replace the aerospace composites that are out there now," said UAH's Dr. John Gilbert.  "I think we can make structures out of concrete that are lighter and more flexible than structures made of graphite epoxy composites."

The UAH concrete could be used to support telescopes in space, for rocket fuselages, to build a lunar colony - or for low-cost emergency shelters on Earth.

"A space station wall or space telescope mount made of this might be thicker than graphite composites, but it wouldn't necessarily be heavier," said Gilbert, a team coach and professor of mechanical engineering.  "The concrete is the lightest part of the structure.  And since concrete is pretty inert, it would be less vulnerable to things like radiation or atomic oxygen erosion."

Redic, who received a mechanical engineering degree in December and will begin graduate studies this fall, has trained three hours a day, seven days a week to prepare for the rigors of paddling.  She ran track at Santa Fe School, but said that paddling is far more strenuous.

However, the concrete boat itself is designed to aid the canoeists as they glide over the water.  The canoe, dubbed "Survivor," has no internal struts or supports to stiffen the boat.  Instead, it was intentionally designed to bend and flex - to "swim" --- as it goes through the water.

A boat moving through water sets up waves. Some waves are pushed away and become wake.  Others flow under the boat.  If the boat is rigid, those waves set up turbulence and cause drag.  The boat has to fight against those forces to move forward.

A canoe that reaches resonance in the water, however, might move with the water rather than against it, Gilbert said.  "Survivor" is designed to flex during each paddle stroke, storing energy, then to release that energy and surge forward between stokes.

"The boat surges forward and swims between strokes," Gilbert said.  "It is unlike any other boat in the field.  It is an entity that no one has ever reckoned with before."

At the southeastern regional competition in March, which UAH won, the team found that the boat's flexing and bending also gives its passengers a ride that takes some getting used to.  Compared to rigid canoes, it was like the difference between riding a bicycle and riding a camel.  

"We really had to train it and ourselves," Gilbert said.  "We're trying to deal with something 
that's as close to a living thing as we've ever had.  You have to get is used to that actually in the saddle, so to speak."

Redic said she is glad that she has been able to get "in the saddle" and have such a hands-on engineering opportunity as a student. 

"It's really nice because coming from a very small town like Santa Fe and Columbia.  I went to a small school and it's nice to see that yeah I ... was able to accomplish so much, as in holding the national record," she said.

UAH Senior Editor Phillip as Gentry contributed to this report.

Follow-up article written June 19, 2001:

"Concrete canoe team finishes first at nationals"

A Santa, Fe native and her teammates at the University of Alabama in Huntsville managed to "outsmart, outperform and out-paddle" the competition at the National Concrete Canoe Championships in San Diego, Calif.

Myia Redic, 23, an engineering student at UAH, paddled the team's canoe "Survivor" to a second-place finish in the co-ed race and earned fourth place in the women's sprint.

UAH finished first overall, winning its fifth national Championship since the competition began in 1988.  No school has been crowned champion so often.

In the concrete canoe championships, the races count for only 30 percent of the team's final score.  The other 70 percent is based on presentations and the design of the canoe, which is evaluated by judges.

UAH won the overall championship because it scored well in every area of the competition, earning first place for its technical design paper, second in final product judging and overall in races, third in the trade show display and fifth in oral presentation.

About 20 schools entered this year's contest, which took place over the weekend.

"Survivor" was made with Portland cement, glass micro-balloons, latex and acrylic fortifier.  The final product weighs 76 pounds and is 22.3 feet long.

Redic, who will study aerospace engineering as a grad student in the fall, said she plans to continue her work with the concrete canoe team.

"It's been two years for me to get (the championship)," Redic said.  "We worked really well as a team together, we could not have done it without working together."