ASCE NH Student Chapter
University of New Hampshire Concrete Canoe 2025 – 2026
This year the University of New Hampshire’ s Concrete Canoe Team had the opportunity to compete in the Northeast Student Symposium hosted by Roger Williams University. After a year of testing mixes, construction, and other preparations, our canoe was ready for the competition. The construction of our canoe went smoothly last year so we kept the female mold system and the two layer casting process. Another thing we kept from last year was our reinforcement. We use two kinds of reinforcement for our canoe; one is mixed in to the concrete and the other is added during casting. Both are made from basalt, which makes our design more sustainable. Chopped basalt fibers are added to the concrete mix and a basalt fiber mesh is laid in between two the layers of concrete on casting day. We faced some issues last year and because of those, we changed some design aspects of our canoe. Last year’ s canoe performed very well at the competition, but our mix was over designed, and the canoe itself was too narrow, making it very tippy. To improve the stability, we widened the canoe to be 35 inches instead of 20 inches. We also changed our concrete mix in an attempt to make the canoe lighter. This new mix had a lighter dry density of 79 lbs / cubic foot but a reduced strength of 2130 psi at 28 days. Our final canoe had a weight of around 417 lbs. Originally, we had been aiming for a lower weight but some measuring errors in our casting process made the walls thicker than they were supposed to be. This year we went with a golf theme of Putting Around and to have our canoe match our theme we colored it bright green with powder dye. Overall, the competition went well for our team and out of the 12 schools that competed we placed 6th. The best part of the competition for us was our race times; in both the men’ s and the coed races we placed 3rd. As a team we are happy with these results from the competition and will be making some changes to help us perform better at next year’ s competition. These changes will be in our construction method and adjusting our mix design slightly. We are looking forward to growing our team this fall and competing again next spring.