In February, the CEE Seismic Design Team traveled to San Diego to compete in the 2011 Undergraduate Seismic Design Competition hosted by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI).
The competition attracted 28 universities from across the world such as UCSD, Illinois-Urbana, Cal Poly-SLO, Oregon State, Georgia Tech, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia and Technical University Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
Each university had as its objective to design, analyze, and fabricate a balsa wood model of a high-rise structure, which was then value-priced and subjected to scaled grounds motions on a shake table.
For preparation, students learned how to read acceleration and displacement response spectra for historical earthquakes, acquired the skills to use SAP2000 for its modal-analysis and time-history analysis by modeling structures, as well as conducted shake-table testing.
For many undergraduates, the competition is their first exposure to the field of earthquake engineering.