Sometimes playing with your food can be a good thing.
Students who took part in the 35th annual Heavyweight Spaghetti Bridge Competition at Okanagan College on Friday spent hours building their “almost edible” creations. The ingredients are simple: pasta and glue.
“You have the tubes for the arch, you have just the regular noodles for the spokes and you also have some lasagna across the bottom for the roads,” Grade 9 student Hanya Riddick said.
The bridge must be less than a kilogram in weight, and its span must be less than a metre.
It’s then put to the test by the official fettucine fault line.
“We begin to apply a load very, very slowly to allow the bridge to settle in,” said Iain Cameron, a mechanical engineering technology professor.
Then the pressure is ramped up.
“We go in steps, in increments of force, and we use hydraulic fluid pressure to do it through a hydraulic system with a cylinder, and it pulls on the bridges from a chain and hook,” Cameron said.
Some bridges can withstand more than 200 kilograms.
Cameron said a good indication that students are using their noodles properly is if the bridge explodes.
“The good bridges explode, and there’s very little pieces,” Cameron said. “They’ve optimized their design so it distributes all the internal forces equally along the arch, and the whole thing explodes so I actually jump because I’m not expecting it.”
Students said the competition helps keep them interested in science.
“It’s awesome. It’s really fun watching the bridge explode,” Grade 9 student Justin Dessert said.
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