• Prizes and Awards,

Centrale Nantes Students win the SAMPE 2016 Composite Bridge Competition

The 25th SAMPE France Technical Days were held on 17 & 18 November in Montargis and at the HUTCHINSON Research Centre. Congratulations to the team of six Centrale Nantes students, winners of the national Composite Bridge competition. This is the second win for Centrale Nantes since 2013.

on November 24, 2016

The Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering (SAMPE®) is a global professional member society, provides information on new materials and processing technology either via conferences, exhibitions, technical forums, publications, or books in which professionals in this field can exchange ideas and air their views. As the only technical society encompassing all fields of endeavor in materials and processes, SAMPE provides a unique and valuable forum for scientists, engineers, and academicians.

SAMPE has 5,000 members in the United States, 920 in Europe (around 250 of which are in France) and 300 in Japan. The number of members ensures the quality and quantity of information that can be made available to all for the promotion of New Materials and Processes.

The Centrale Nantes team, composed of five engineering students and one student pursuing a double diploma in architecture and engineering, won the 2016 SAMPE Composite Bridge Competition. (SAMPE stands for Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering).

Congratulations to Maxime ASTRUC, Valentin BUSATO, Olivia CHABANEIX, Camille CHEVRIER, Justin KINDA and Raphaël LANGLOIS of the Mechanical Engineering for Materials and Manufacturing Processes who, with the help of their teacher, Jean-Michel Lebrun, brought the trophy back to Centrale Nantes. A Centrale Nantes team won this competition back in 2013.

"We had to design and build the most resistant bridge possible using the composite materials we were given." Valentin

The 2016 national competition required participating teams to design and build from specifications a model bridge using the composite materials provided. The six students determined the best ratio between ultimate tensile strength and bridge mass.

"The goal is to optimise the ratio between the force required to reach failure and the weight of the bridge", Valentin.


Do you have any advice for future Centrale teams taking part in this competition?

"I would advise them to be curious because you learn so much from those supervising. Don't be afraid to go for it", Raphaël

"It's a very dynamic project because we learned a lot, even if we didn't know so much at the start. It was a great experience!" Maxime


"Our bridge weighs less than one kilogramme and yet it can withstand 3.6 tonnes. The project took less than one month to accomplish thanks to the team's motivation and the help of our teacher, Jean-Michel Lebrun, and Centrale Nantes which ensured that we had everything we needed to win this competition", Justin



Seven other establishments took part in the competition: Polytech Nantes, IUT Saint-Nazaire, IUT Bordeaux, Paul Sabatier University Toulouse, ENSMA ISAE Poitiers, Ecole des Mines de Douai and Polytech Orléans.
Published on November 25, 2016 Updated on March 23, 2017