Two Taiwanese and one Hong Kong team won prizes yesterday at the end of a two-day earthquake engineering contest hosted by the National Applied Research Laboratories.
The Taiwanese teams took home awards in the high-school and college categories, while the Hong Kong-based team won the postgraduate category and received a special award.
First held in 2001, the contest, titled “Introducing and Demonstrating Earthquake Engineering Research in Schools,” was hosted by the National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering (NCREE) in Taipei on Friday and yesterday.
The contest drew a record of 110 teams, including 38 teams from South Korea, Australia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau and the Philippines.
High-school and undergraduate teams were required to create miniature buildings that were put through several simulated earthquake tests, with the maximum peak ground acceleration (PGA) reaching 800 galileo (Gal).
Postgraduates were required to build earthquake-resistant models to undergo tests of up to 1,200Gal.
The NCREE published the results on Saturday evening.
The high-school category champion title went to a team from Kaohsiung Industrial High School’s architecture department, which also sent the winning team last year and has participated in the event for seven years.
“I feel a great sense of achievement,” team member Huang Yung-shen (黃泳紳) said. “It was a great opportunity to practice what we have learned in class.”
“Students from vocational schools are overlooked in some environments, but society needs them because of the technical skills they bring,” the team’s instructor, Yeh Ming-chung (葉明忠), said.
A team from Chung Yuan Christian University’s Department of Civil Engineering won the undergraduate title.
Their setup of rubber bands and cotton strings as side-supports for their wooden structure was the key to their victory, team member Huang Sung-yun (黃頌云) said, adding that they had been working with limited knowledge, as they were only sophomores.
The Hong Kong team was made up of different nationalities, including an Indian, an Italian and a Hungarian member. The team adorned their model with a fiery dragon, representing the spirit needed to face the most demanding quake test of 1,200Gal.
Taiwan’s earthquake engineering technology stands out on the international stage, but the nation still has something to learn from Japan, NCREE director-general Huang Shih-chien (黃世建) said, adding that earthquake technology should be combined with the social sciences and mass communication.
Since the 921 Earthquake in 1999, the government has made a great effort to upgrade public structures, but there is room for improvement in the safety of private buildings, Huang added.
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