Team takes 2nd place at Seismic Design Competition
Architectural engineering students placed second in a seismic design competition in San Diego.
A team of Cal Poly architectural engineering (ARCE) students placed second in the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) Seismic Design Competition (SDC) in early March in San Diego.
The Cal Poly team competed against 46 other university teams from throughout the U.S. and countries such as Canada, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Malaysia, Mexico, Turkey and Romania.
The Cal Poly team’s months-long preparation involved writing a design proposal; constructing a 5-foot-tall balsa-wood model to survive two shake-table ground motions; refining computer simulations to accurately predict the model’s performance; and developing communication materials, including a poster and oral presentation.
Their efforts led to a second-place award for presentation and poster, third in proposal, and fifth for architecture. Fourteen students were accompanied by ARCE Assistant Professor Anahid Behrouzi, Cal Poly’s EERI student chapter faculty advisor.
Of this group, 12 undergraduates participated in the competition. Jenna Williams, graduate student and, past EERI seismic design competition team captain, served as this year’s chair.
Students Alejandra Bravo and Nicholas Slavin presented research with Behrouzi during a talk titled “Leveraging ArcGIS Mapping: Investigation of Concrete Building Damage after 2017 Mexico Earthquake.” “Our Top 10 performance in the competition sub-categories led to significant bonus points for our team,” Behrouzi said. “The students’ quality construction and the model’s outstanding seismic performance under shake-table testing helped the team rank second overall.”
