USM TEAMS RANK 5TH AND 11TH PLACES AT IDEERS COMPETITION 2018

Two teams from the School of Civil Engineering, Universiti Sains Malaysia have achieved encouraging results in the “Introducing and Demonstrating Earthquake Engineering Research for Schools (IDEERS) 2018” which was held on September 14 – 15 in Taipei, Taiwan. This international competition was held at the Taiwan National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering (NCREE). This program is jointly organized by NCREE, National Applied Research Laboratories (NARLabs) and British Council (BC). Each team was required to construct a building model using the provided materials in 6.5 hours. All models were then tested for various levels of bi-directional earthquake ground motion (from 250 gal to 800 gal) simulated using a shaking table.

There were forty-nine undergraduate teams from Southeast Asia, Australia, China, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan participated in this competition. Both USM teams were awarded Quake-Resistant Certificate for which their models passed the test with 400 gal synthetic ground motion. USM team consisting of third year students led by Lee Jian Yee with team members of Chan Zheng Ruii, Lew Kah Wei and Richard Ng Eng Yao won 5th place and received Efficiency Ratio Certificate of Excellent. Another team comprising four forth year students, Ho Kar Meng, Khoo Zheng Yang, Tng Kah Lok and Yeoh Seng Keat took 11th place. This competition has inspired and educated the future engineers about the importance of designing earthquake proof structures.