Two teams jointly won first place in the 'Technorush' student competition, which was held in the pool set up at the Technion especially for the occasion
12 teams competed yesterday (Wednesday) in the 'Technorush' competition at the Technion and faced a complex engineering challenge: maneuvering a vessel using rubber bands. This year's competition was held in the spirit of "green energy" under the title GUMPOOL 2015: rubber-powered boats, built in advance by the contestants, were required to sail 8 meters long, anchor with a magnet and shoot a jet of water into a funnel from a distance of three meters, all in the fastest time.
"On the occasion of the competition, a dedicated pool of 72 square meters was established at the Technion, in which the vessels of the 12 teams that passed the qualifiers and the semi-finals competed," said Ben Grotsky, who organized the competition on behalf of the Technion Student Union. "The competition regulations set high design-engineering standards for the participants, and I am happy about the creativity that the students demonstrated in the planning and design of the vessels."
At the end of a surprising and fascinating competition, and after a long deliberation, the judges decided to award the first place to two teams. Each of them will win a prize of NIS 7500.
The members of the "Smiley" group are the students Marina Minkin from the Faculty of Computer Science, Vasily Witchevski from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Michael Pozevsky from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering. "We worked with a vane that pushes the water back, and according to Newton's third law, the water pushes the boat back," Pozevsky explained. "In order to reduce the drag during the cruise, we built a mechanism that lowers the jetting pump into the water only at the end of the cruise."
The second group that won first place includes Hila Shmuel and Iti Mengel, students from the Faculty of Mathematics who cracked the secret of speed. Group member Hila Shmuel, who is studying physics-mathematics as part of the Technion's excellent program, explained that "the propeller sits directly on the rubber and thus saves friction, and its position at the front of the boat means that the boat rises and so the friction with the water is also small."
Third place went to Yair Garfunkel and his friend Or Oron, both from Magev, who worked on the project for two months. He is a student in the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Technion and she is a graduate of the visual communication course at Vizu. "That doesn't mean I was responsible for the design," she says. "We did everything together, both in planning and execution." The two used sewage pipes as floats on both sides of the boat, a large, red plastic propeller that is made by laser cutting, and a white trophy. "Basically it was also supposed to shoot confetti, but that feature didn't work," they say.
The groups presented an impressive demographic and technological diversity. A group of master's degree students from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering navigated the sailing vessel using the mobile phone, and 82-year-old Vichy Zimmerman from Kibbutz Ein Harod and his son-in-law Ronen Atzili, who won the competition last year, this time navigated the ship Endurance, named after the sailing ship that went to Antarctica in 1914.
The "Technorush" competition was held for the 13th year in memory of its thinker and founder, the late Niv-Ya Durban.
Niv-Ya, a student and an outstanding graduate of the Technion, was murdered by a robber in Tel Aviv while he was an officer in the IDF. The competition and the prizes are sponsored by Dr. Robert Shilman ("Dr. Bob" by everyone), who paid off at the Technion. The jury included professors Benny Natan, Gil Yosilevsky and David Durban (Niv-Ya's father), all from the Faculty of Aeronautics and Space Engineering at the Technion.
At the end of the competition, Professor David Durvan said that the competition is the essence of engineering, and it teaches the students to plan for the unknown.
