Designing a Concrete Canoe

i like the idea of renting canoes out. ive been doing this for two years already. i know what works and what doesn't. we are currently using rhino and maxsurf to design our boat. any more tips? this is a civil engineering exercise designed to help civil engineers better hone their craft. so next time you're standing on a skyscraper made of concrete, i'll bet you anything the designer was on concrete canoe.

 

becasue steel and aluminum float real well. they made entire boats out of concrete in ww2 when there was a steel shortage.

 

I've followed the concrete canoe competitions for some time, and have to say that they really do bring out some innovative construction methods. For example, many now use carbon fibre rovings pre-tensioned along the major axis to pre-stress the thin concrete skin and make it better able to take bending loads.

The competition is about getting students to come up with ideas for using a seemingly inappropriate material for a small boat creatively. Some of the designs are nothing short of outstanding, technically, with students developing high strength mortar compositions, with light weight fillers and using non-metallic tensile elements for strength.

 

You could mix shredded polyester or fiberglass to the mix to improve tensile strength of the concrete.

 

Every year the ASCE has a competition and just about every year it seems it's a topic here. Go down to the bottom of the page for a few threads about it and also try a search of the full forum under various terms.