A team of six civil engineering students from North Dakota State University won the 19th annual ASCE/AISC National Student Steel Bridge Competition, held May 28-29 at Purdue University.

Second place went to the team from the University of California, Berkeley, while Lakehead University, Ontario, Canada, took third overall.

The celebrated event featured 46 teams and about 500 students from universities across the U.S. and Canada.

Each team displayed its skills in steel design, steel fabrication and teamwork in building a 21-ft-long scaled model of a proposed bridge that met particular hypothetical requirements given to all teams.

This year’s specification stated the bridge was a means of providing access to a new oil field located in the Arctic Tundra, and had to span a river and adjacent floodway.

The bridges were judged in six key categories related to steel design and construction: construction speed, stiffness, lightness, economy, display and efficiency.

The teams with the best combined rankings across all six categories earn overall award recognition.

From the Midwest region, the Illinois Institute of Technology was first in the Lightness Category.

The 2011 National Student Steel Bridge Competition will be held May 20-21 at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas.