Coffey sponsor the annual ‘Pasta Bridge’ competition for First Year Engineering students at National University of Ireland, Galway and Team 2 comprising of Dylan Brady, James Mannion & John Hughes were recently announced as the winning entry in the 2022 competition.
Dylan Brady, James Mannion, John Hughes, Eoin Colgan (Coffey) 
Winning Entry – Team 2
This year, Team 2 comprising of Dylan Brady, James Mannion & John Hughes were announced as winners of the 2022 competition and took away the €250 first prize. The team designed and built a bridge that weighed 230g and offered a structural efficiency (ratio of the mass a structure can support relative to the mass of the structure itself) of 85.
The annual Pasta Bridge competition sponsored by Coffey is a fun and challenging opportunity for First Year Engineering Students at NUIG to test their engineering skills and to demonstrate their planning, creativity, problem-solving and team-work required to design and build a bridge using only spaghetti pasta and hot glue guns. A total prize fund of €500 was available with prizes awarded for first, second and third places based on the structural efficiency of the bridge designed and built based on the competition brief.
The project brief requested students to design and build a bridge using only spaghetti pasta and hot glue guns. The bridge must be a truss design, span 50 cm, must carry 20 kg and cannot exceed 60 cm length, 25 cm height and 10 cm width. The students received some lectures on bridge construction and structural analysis prior to commencing their projects but all of the design and construction work is carried out by the students themselves, working in groups.
In second place was Team 34 which was made up of Jack O’Brien, Jacques Lusson, Sean Hogan with Kieran Hanrahan missing from the picture. Their bridge had a mass of 775g nd with a structural efficiency of 26, the team received €150 in recognition of their effort in the competition.
Team 46 came in third and comprised of James Gorman, Dara Keane and Mike McDubhghaill. Ruth Higgins is missing from the team picture. This entry had a bridge mass of 945g with a structural efficiency of 21 and the design was awarded with the €100 cheque for third place.
Congratulations to all the First Year Engineering students who participated in this years competition and a special word of thanks to Stephen Nash of NUIG who supported the students and presided over the competition this year.
