Our student team from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering won the Excellent Team Work Prize in the ‘2nd National Competition of Structural Design for University Undergraduates 2008’, organized by the National Education Ministry, the Ministry of Residency and Buildings, and the Society of Civil Engineering of China, took place in Dalian University of Science and Technology from October 22 to 25.
Our team composed of three students, Liu Bing, Luo Sai and Lu Jie Lin, led by Prof. Kou Kun Pang, and technical advisor Prof. Er Guo Kang. There are 46 universities with 47 teams participated in this competition. This is the final competition after passing the first-round competition with over 100 universities in 2005. 45 teams were invited to attend this final competition. Our UM team was one of the qualified team as we have won the third price in the 5th International Inter-University Invitational Civil Engineering Competition at the beginning of 2008.
The model presented by UM team is a cable-stayed bridge. The experts of the evaluation committee highly appreciated the model for its excellent formulation and application of mechanics principles. Other universities were also well prepared with their design. As it is the first time for UM team to use paper and strings to make a structure and the material properties were unfamiliar, the UM team needed to spend a lot of time in testing the material properties, analyzing and designing the structure on site. However, due to our high efficiency of preparing and making the structure, and our excellent application of mechanics principles in the design together with our team work performance, our team was much appreciated by the judges. Finally our team was awarded the Excellent Team Work Prize with a few other high-level universities.