2019 Seismic Design Team

Our undergraduate seismic design competition team consisted of 5 members traveling to Vancouver, Canada to compete in the annual seismic design competition and 8 other undergraduate members who participated in the design and build process throughout the year.

In this year’s Seismic Design Competition hosted by the Student Leadership Council of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, the University of Texas at Austin’s undergraduate seismic design team designed a basal wood high-rise known as U[Building Footprint] Tower according to given rules to compete in Vancouver, Canada against 38 teams from around the world. Team members Troy Marasigan (Captain), Jason Xu, Maddey Collins, Daniel Duffy, and Gabrielle Garcia (shown below) gave a technical presentation about the structural, architectural, and economic aspects of the building to a panel of professional judges.

Preparation consisted of a design process, construction, and finally transportation. For the design process, several iterations of the architecture were reviewed and deliberated. The team concluded on a design with the required T-shaped base having sides taper upwards for structural stability and aesthetics. Though ambitious, team members successfully followed through with the construction made easy through pre-fabricated floors and columns.

Throughout the design and construction processes, the structural subteam performed analyses of the building performance by using software such as SAP2000 to simulate earthquake ground motions against the design. This allowed the team to alter the design to create the most structurally sound model for the competition.

As a result, UT Austin was able to successfully survive the two ground motions and place 12^th (out of 38 teams) in the competition overall. Furthermore, the team was also able to win 1^st place in the Architecture category (giving us an honorable mention seen below) and 1^st place in Poster design. It was extremely rewarding to see all of our efforts being recognized at the competition in front of schools from around the world.

The year-long experience and week-long competition introduced our team to unique skills in technical design, construction, and communication as well as new perspectives from other schools and graduate students. For the following years, we are looking forward to continuing our reputation of success and enhancing our engineering knowledge. We plan on improving our project management skills through more efficient budgeting and scheduling as well as precision in our design and construction process. UT’s team is excited for next year’s competition in San Diego, California! All of this would not have been possible without our generous sponsors who helped fund us for the competition.

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