In 2025, the PCI Big Beam Competition celebrated its 25th anniversary, marking a quarter century of hands-on learning, innovation, and collaboration between universities and the precast concrete industry.
This year’s milestone event was made even more memorable as Northern Arizona University (NAU) captured its first-ever overall win, with sponsorship and manufacturing support from TPAC, EnCon United’s southwest manufacturing subsidiary.
Hosted annually by the Precast/Prestressed Concrete Institute (PCI), the Big Beam Competition—also known as the PCI Engineering Design Competition—challenges student teams to design, build, and test a 20-foot precast, prestressed concrete beam to failure. PCI-certified precast producers mentor the teams and fabricate the beams, giving students rare exposure to real-world design, manufacturing, and testing processes. Submissions are judged on load performance, efficiency, cost, creativity, technical documentation, and a project video simulating real-life structural demands.
For NAU, the competition is embedded within an established senior capstone program. Led by Associate Professor Ben Dymond, whose background is in structural engineering and prestressed concrete research, NAU students take on the challenge over the course of an entire academic year.
“For students, it’s year-round work,” Dymond explained. “They’re doing more than just structural design. It’s project planning, time management, budgeting, and communication. It encompasses everything they’ve learned over the last four years, applied to one project.”
Each fall, PCI releases updated competition rules outlining beam dimensions, target loads, material constraints, and scoring criteria. Within those parameters, innovation is encouraged.
TPAC plays a critical role in bringing those designs to life. Students submit beam drawings, which are reviewed and refined collaboratively with TPAC’s team before fabrication. “They create shop drawings, we go back and forth, and once everyone’s comfortable, TPAC fabricates the beam,” Dymond said. “The students get to visit the plant, observe the process, and understand how professional manufacturing actually works.”
That exposure leaves a lasting impression. “Touring a precast plant is mind-blowing,” Dymond added. “Students are amazed by the scale, the quality control, and how much work goes into what might seem like a simple beam. Manufacturing is a huge piece of the industry that’s often missing from traditional coursework.”
Once delivered to NAU’s lab, the students handle test setup and execution, documenting behavior, cracking, and failure modes under faculty supervision. The final deliverables include a detailed engineering report—with full calculations—and a recorded test video.
The winning 2025 team—Payton Correia, Zachary Fukumoto, Isabella Velasco, and Caitlin Yazzie—worked closely with TPAC throughout the process.
“Working with an industry manufacturer was eye opening,” said winning team member Payton Correia. “It was really exciting to get a glimpse into the professional world and how casually industry professionals talk about concepts that we studied for months in a classroom. One of my favorite moments was testing day and getting to see our beam perform so well. It was incredibly gratifying and made all of our hard work worth it.”
For Dymond, the win was years in the making. “We’ve placed second and finished in the top five several times, but never first,” he said. “It’s been really fun to finally see NAU win and to celebrate the producer, too. TPAC gives back to students, the industry, and the next generation of engineers. It’s a great, never-ending cycle of precast engineering.”
