A team of civil engineering students from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute won the GeoWall 2020 competition during the Geo-Congress 2020 conference recently held by the Geo-Institute (G-I) of the American Society of Civil Engineers in Minneapolis.

The goal of the student GeoWall competition was to design and build a model of a mechanically stabilized earth (MSE) retaining wall using paper reinforcement. When designing their wall, teams were trying to use the least amount of reinforcement possible to support retained soil and design loads. Students also were judged on how well they communicated their analysis and design.

The Rensselaer team — led by student captain Lydia Kelley and advised by Omar Osama El-Shafee, a lecturer in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering — submitted its design last fall and was one of 20 teams invited to build and load their design at the conference. The Rensselaer students outperformed their competition and were named the 2020 national champions.