LATROBE, PA – A couple of years ago, a few engineering students at Saint Vincent College for their senior capstone project entered a national competition to construct a workable canoe out of concrete. The outcome, unfortunately, was a shipwreck.
“Neither of the canoes got to the point where we trusted them enough to put them out on the water,” said Dr. Derek Breid, associate professor of engineering in the Herbert W. Boyer School of Natural Sciences, Mathematics and Computing.
Breid directs the capstone program for the College’s engineering students. As he searched for a project for the 2025 seniors, Breid got a suggestion from Saint Vincent alumnus Philip J. Donoghue, C’09, who works in the concrete industry.
Every two years, the American Concrete Institute sponsors an international fiber-reinforced concrete (FRC) bowling ball competition. Unlike the ill-fated concrete canoe experience, this time the Saint Vincent students found it easy to get the ball rolling.
“This competition was a good fit for us,” Breid said. “It's required multiple people and it combined aspects of mechanical, materials and some chemical engineering.”
On March 30, a team of four Saint Vincent seniors—Mark Grenchik, an engineering major from Gettysburg; Joey Jafarace, a math and engineering major from Conneaut, Ohio; Morgan Klingeman, an engineering major from Harrisburg; and Brayden Gibson, an engineering major from Warren, Ohio—was among 50 college teams that competed in Toronto, Canada.
The team placed 33rd in the Analysis Test category, which included meeting targets for the size and weight of the ball, the forces sustained during the crush test and scoring high during the bowling competition, and 32nd in the Design Prediction category. The team's strongest area was the bowling competition: students attempted six frames of bowling in which they had to knock over six pins, making the max score 36. The team scored a total of 28/36 pins, tying for 22nd.
The concrete balls also had to demonstrate a consistent strength as they were crushed. In the compression test, the ball started fracturing much earlier than what the team had seen in preliminary testing, which unfortunately led to poor mechanical performance.
“We had some struggles and setbacks, but it was a lot of fun,” Gibson said. “We all dug into some research in our own fields. I was mainly concrete. Morgan really hit on the mold. Mark was kind of like a glue guy, helping out everywhere, and was great with tracking our budget. Joey put a lot of time and effort into the mix design.”
Last September, the students began constructing two round, smooth and strong bowling balls from a fiber-reinforced concrete mixture. Typically, an 8-inch ball of solid concrete weighs about 24 pounds. Balls in the FRC competition cannot weigh more than about 12 pounds, so the seniors chose to use expanded clay beads in their concrete mix.
“The clay beads are so light they’ll float on water,” Jaraface said. “They took up volume and allowed for extra bonding points in our concrete, which is what you're looking for with your coarse aggregate. It also helped with reducing our overall density.”
The competition also has an aesthetics category. For that, the Saint Vincent team got help from Sabine Strickland, a senior digital art and media major from Niceville, Florida. Strickland is part of Saint Vincent’s women’s bowling team, and this year was named to the Allegheny Mountain Collegiate Conference first team.
Using the theme of “spring in Toronto,” Strickland designed Saint Vincent’s bowling balls after the Canadian flag, with a white stripe down the middle and red on the sides with a maple leaf and cherry blossoms.
This marked the first time Saint Vincent took part in the FRC bowling ball event.
“It's kind of cool to be different, to try something and be the first people to do it,” Gibson said. “We went into this project not knowing much about it, but it was cool because you you're taking the first steps. I hope that after we leave, they do this again and can look back on our research, so they don't face some of the struggles we faced.”
The students’ trip to Toronto was made possible by a grant from the A.J. Palumbo Student Research Endowment and funds from the Pittsburgh chapter of the American Concrete Institute. Material testing of preliminary concrete samples was donated by Westmoreland Mechanical Testing and Research.
Morgan Klingeman, Mark Grenchik, Joey Jafarace and Brayden Gibson pose with one of their bowling balls
Gibson releasing the ball during one frame of the bowling competition
