Engineering students shake up international seismic design competition
A team of SF State students, including (from left) Kathleen Ocampo, Jamie Brownell, Ryan Schofield, faculty advisor Zhaoshuo Jiang, Lungyuen Lau, Marisa Araujo, project manager Stephen Pereira Schork and Omar Plata, spent 10 months preparing for the 2016 Earthquake Engineering Research Institute Seismic Design Competition.
Seven SF State engineering students were among the top 10 teams nationally — and the highest-scoring team from a California State University campus — at the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute's annual Seismic Design Competition, held last month in San Francisco.
The team included SF State students Marisa Araujo, Jamie Brownell, Lungyuen Lau, Kathleen Ocampo, Ryan Schofield and Stephen Pereira Schork, advised by Assistant Professor of Engineering Zhaoshuo Jiang. The group spent 10 months designing and constructing their models and testing them on the shake table in SF State's Structural Hazards Mitigation Laboratory.
For the competition, teams design and construct a scaled balsa wood model of a skyscraper, which is then subjected to three different devastating earthquake simulation tests. Models are judged on design, architecture and seismic performance. The SF State team, one of just 33 invited to the competition, finished third in design proposal, sixth in seismic performance and ninth in the overall final ranking, making them the fifth-highest scoring team from the U.S.
For more information about the competition, visit http://slc.eeri.org/SDC2016.htm. Learn more about SF State's School of Engineering at engineering.sfsu.edu.