IDEERS Competition 2018 and Technical Visit to Taiwan
IEM-USM Student Section has sent two teams of undergraduate students led by one advisor from the School of Civil Engineering, Universiti Sains Malaysia from 11th to 20th September 2018 to Taiwan. Both teams have achieved encouraging results in the “Introducing and Demonstrating Earthquake Engineering Research for Schools (IDEERS) 2018” which was held on September 14 – 15 in Taipei, Taiwan. This international competition was held at the Taiwan National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering (NCREE). This program is jointly organized by NCREE, National Applied Research Laboratories (NARLabs) and British Council (BC). Each team was required to construct a building model using the provided materials in 6.5 hours. All models were then tested for various levels of bi-directional earthquake ground motion (from 250 gal to 800 gal; gal = cm/sec2) simulated using a shaking table.
There were forty-nine undergraduate teams from Southeast Asia, Australia, China, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan participated in this competition. Both USM teams were awarded Quake-Resistant Certificate for which their models passed the test with 400 gal synthetic ground motion. USM team consisting of third year students led by Lee Jian Yee with team members of Chan Zheng Ruii, Lew Kah Wei and Richard Ng Eng Yao won 5th place and received Efficiency Ratio Certificate of Excellent. Another team comprising four forth year students, Ho Kar Meng, Khoo Zheng Yang, Tng Kah Lok and Yeoh Seng Keat took 11th place. This competition has inspired and educated the future engineers about the importance of designing earthquake proof structures.
Apart from this competition, the team have joined technical trips to Longteng Broken Bridge, Chelungpu Fault Preservation Park and 921 Earthquake Musuem of Taiwan. Technical visits to National Taiwan University (NTU) and National Central University (NCU) were also carried out to visit the real project designed to resist earthquake and laboratory facilities in earthquake engineering. This has further enhanced the knowledge and give international exposure to student.
