University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: March 20, 2008

By KEVIN FRYLING
Reporter Staff Writer

A team of UB engineering students placed third in a recent national earthquake engineering design competition.

From left, Kar Him Chiu, Robert Wurstner, Cheuk Kwok, Melissa Norland, Barboaros Cetiner and Neda Stoeva took third place in the 2008 Undergraduate Seismic Design Competition.

The 2008 Undergraduate Seismic Design Competition, held last month during the annual meeting of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute in New Orleans, challenged undergraduate engineering students to design and fabricate a scale-model frame structure for a cost-effective, earthquake-resistant commercial office building. The 5-foot balsa-wood structures were judged based on performance under severe earthquake simulation—as well as the annual income of the building based on rental income, initial costs and seismic costs. There also were architectural, poster and presentation components to the scoring.

The UB team—Barbaros Cetiner of Bursa, Turkey; Kar Him Chiu of Hong Kong; Cheuk Kwok of Staten Island; Melissa Norlund of Petersburg, N.Y.; Neda Stoeva of Barbar, Bahrain; and Rob Wurstner of Buffalo—competed against 17 teams from top universities across the United States.

“The Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering is extremely proud of the accomplishments of our students, and our team’s great performance at the Undergraduate Seismic Design Competition in New Orleans is another example of our students’ excellence,” says A. Scott Weber, professor and department chair. “Our students’ ability to innovatively apply the knowledge they have learned in the classroom to real problems, work synergistically in teams and represent UB Engineering and university with distinction is tremendously gratifying and exciting.”

Sabanayagam Thevanayagam, associate professor of civil, structural and environmental engineering and director of education for MCEER, notes that the competition is designed to engage students in the idea that buildings can be built to withstand severe earthquakes.

“They have the necessary background to design and construct buildings and bridges, but they haven’t learned yet about earthquake-induced vibration,” Thevanayagam says. “In this exercise, students learn how to estimate these new forces—and design against them.”

UB students have an advantage when it comes to earthquake-resistant design due to the location of MCEER, a National Science Foundation “center of excellence” in earthquake engineering, on the UB North Campus, he says. While UB does not offer any undergraduate courses that formally teach earthquake engineering, he says students who participate in the competition learn through practice—as well as being exposed to the experts themselves.

“We have a great research center, a great laboratory and a lot of people funded by MCEER, so the students are not working in a vacuum,” Thevanayagam says. “They can come and see what we’re testing in our laboratories; they can talk to graduate students and faculty. They don’t take a course in earthquake engineering—they learn by listening, seeing, talking and developing an idea about how buildings can be designed.”

Yu-Cheng Ou, a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering who has served as a mentor to UB students participating in the competition for the past three years, says that one of the most important elements of the event is that it provides engineering students with a hands-on project through which they can experience the real-world application of the knowledge they’ve acquired in the classroom.

“Normally,” he says, “undergraduate students don’t have the opportunity to really put their knowledge into practice. This is a very good chance to learn from doing.”

Norlund, a senior engineering student and captain of the UB team, adds that designing and constructing the model for the competition took a lot of hard work and dedication on the part of everyone involved.

“It took us about three weeks to build,” she says. “We started building it over winter break and finished this semester. We pretty much lived in the lab those few weeks—any spare moment we had we were there.”

But the whole experience—long nights in the lab, a trip to the conference in New Orleans, subjecting their design to a miniature shake table—left her and her teammates with a much stronger grasp of the ins and outs of earthquake engineering, she says.

“It was a good experience,” she says. “I would definitely recommend it to other people. It was interesting because we got to learn so much.”

The ultimate goal of the Undergraduate Seismic Design Competition—which is to interest students in pursuing graduate work and research in earthquake engineering—is one in which UB has met significant success, Thevanayagam adds. UB also took third place in the 2006 competition held in San Francisco. The members of that year’s team, Charles Ekiert and David Keller, are employed at the major engineering firms of Thornton Tomasetti in Philadelphia and Weidlinger Associates in Washington, D.C., respectively.