Cal Poly’s Seismic Design team placed second out of 28 teams at the 2011 Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI)’s undergraduate Seismic Design competition last weekend.
The competition gives teams several months to come up with a 5-foot-tall balsa wood skyscraper. The structure is then placed on a shake table, which simulates the historical El Centro (1940) and Northridge (1994) earthquakes. The third earthquake is created by UC Davis graduate students, and is specifically made to topple the structures.
The goal of the competition is to present the best design and predict how it will fair in earthquakes, as well as give a presentation and create a poster.
Architectural engineering senior Yoni Sadka said he believes Cal Poly put in more work on the “Diadem” (the name of the structure) than any other school, when it “rocked” the presentation and had the closest prediction.
“We came in so cocky and confident that we were going to win the thing,” he said. “Then we see the accelerometer fall and the whole crowd was like ‘Aawwww!’”
The accelerometer is a palm-sized device, weighing 3.5 pounds, placed on the top of the structure. It measures the acceleration of motion during the simulated earthquakes. If it falls, it may result in disqualification.
Sadka said he left the competition early with some teammates, crushed over the loss. He got a text from one of the judges, who is a Cal Poly alumna, that read they placed second.
“I pulled the car over and we just looked at each other and we were like, ‘No, she’s just messing with us,’” Sadka said.
They called their teammates, but couldn’t reach anyone. Finally, a teammate sent them a picture of the trophy and realization hit them.
“It was cool; going from not placing at all to getting second was better than nothing,” he said.
Kevin Chen, an architectural engineering senior, participated in the club as part of his senior project. He said he still cannot get over the shock of winning after expecting the worst.
“It’s one of the heaviest penalties in the competition,” Chen said. “It has the potential of reducing the score by half.”
James Myers, a civil engineering junior on the team, said the judges were able to overlook the rule involving the accelerometer.
“We didn’t fall over, so the building didn’t fail,” he said.
Once the structure proved it could survive the earthquake simulations, Myers went up to the structure and kicked it over to the crowd and judges cheering. The moment was captured on video and put on YouTube, where there is a montage of videos showing the structure in its practice phase.
“When I did it, I was still really frustrated, depressed,” he said. “Hundreds of man hours each for 18 different people … we just felt like it was wasted when you fail on a technicality.”
Compared to the team of eight last year, the team this year is at 18 with students from civil and architectural engineering. The floor plan, Myers said, was actually designed by a civil engineering student who had only just begun his structural analysis class.
“Being interdisciplinary, there was some give and take, but it’s a lot of fun to work with other colleges,” Myers said. “Especially one that’s almost outside the college of engineering, we deal with (other majors) a lot … but we never see the ‘archies.’ It’s kind of cool to work with them on projects like this.”
Garrett Hagen, an architectural engineering senior, said time constraints were an obstacle the team had to overcome when meeting.
“It was very difficult to schedule times that everybody could meet and get everybody on track as far as what needed to be done,” Hagen said. “I think everybody involved did a really good job in making it happening.”