Media

A civil engineering postgraduate team from HKU won a total of six awards at “Introducing and Demonstrating Earthquake Engineering Research in Schools” (IDEERS2018), including the Championship (First Prize) of the Postgraduate Division, Structural Design Awards, Aesthetic Architecture Award, Design-Concept Exhibition Awards, Best Presentation Award and Innovation Award of Seismic Isolation and Energy Dissipation.

The winning team consisted of 4 MSc Civil Engineering students, Peter Choi Siu Kwan, Tommy Wong Po Hon, Michael Cheng Chun Ho and Andy Tang Hing Ka and was supervised by Dr Ray Su Kai Leung, Associate Professor of Department of Civil Engineering. They participated in the postgraduate division of the competition and joined a 3-day competition at the Taiwan National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering (NCREE) in September 2018.

The “Introducing and Demonstrating Earthquake Engineering Research in Schools” (IDEERS) is a renowned international earthquake engineering competition for civil engineering students which was jointly organised by NCREE, the National Applied Research Laboratories (NARLabs) and the British Council every year since 2001. It attracted teams from all over the world including the US, UK, New Zealand, Guatemala, Japan, Indonesia, Taiwan and Hong Kong, etc. This year, there were over 100 teams and 500 participants competing in three divisions, high-school, undergraduate and postgraduate.

Teams competed under the Postgraduate Division were required to design and construct a building model which was able to survive under 1000gal earthquake accurately but fail at 1050gal to ensure the model was not over-designed. They were also required to design a model façade and a poster introducing their seismic design and give a presentation in a conference. The HKU team started designing and constructing a building model with combination of seismic protection devices, performed numerical simulation and experiments for the building model a few months before the competition. The team eventually scored the highest in the presentation, lowest top floor acceleration measured and the highest total score among all teams in the postgraduate division and won six awards in total.

More details of the competition could be obtained from https://www.ncree.org/ideers/2018/.

Media enquiries:
Ms Celia Lee, Faculty of Engineering, HKU (Tel: 3917 8519; Email: leecelia@hku.hk) or
Miss Bonnie Tsang, Faculty of Engineering, HKU (Tel: 3917 1924; Email: bonniepy@hku.hk)