July 30, 2009
News View Article
Building With Bamboo Nets Pitt, Indian Students a Nod for United Nations-Daimler International Engineering AwardWork to popularize bamboo as a sustainable building material in the Indian Himalayas is among 30 finalists selected from 932 candidates for UNESCO-Daimler's Mondialogo Engineering Award to be presented in November
-A team of students from the University of Pittsburgh and the Indian
Institute of Technology in Kanpur (IITK) working in the Indian
Himalayas to popularize bamboo construction as a sustainable
construction method were recently selected as finalists for an
international engineering award presented by the United Nations
Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and German
automaker Daimler.
The Pitt-IITK team is among 30 finalist teams
for the Mondialogo Engineering Award presented by Mondialogo, an
initiative of Daimler and UNESCO that sponsors intercultural
collaborations. The finalists were selected from 932 research proposals
from 94 countries and will attend a Nov. 6-9 convention in Stuttgart,
Germany, where the final selection will be made. The engineering award
encourages engineering students in developing and developed countries
to create cooperative projects that address some of the major
challenges of the 21st century, including poverty, sustainable
development, climate change, and improving life in the developing
world.
The Pitt-IITK project, “Promotion of Bamboo as a Cost
Effective and Sustainable Structural Material,” relates to the team's
ongoing collaboration with an engineering group in India to promote,
design, and build bamboo structures in the Indian Himalayan regions of
Darjeeling and Sikkim. The Pitt group is led by Bhavna Sharma, a
Swanson School of Engineering PhD candidate and recipient of an
Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship from Pitt's
Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation. Kent Harries, a Pitt civil
engineering professor and William Kepler Whiteford Faculty Fellow,
serves as the project's faculty advisor and leads students to India for
fieldwork.
Sikkim and Darjeeling straddle the planet's most
unstable terrain. Here, modern construction materials such as concrete
and masonry-which became fashionable in the 20th century-pose a threat
to the environment and human safety. These materials have to be trucked
along rugged, winding roads where untrained contractors and temporary
workers cobble together buildings that list on the steep hillsides and
crumble from frequent mudslides and earthquakes. Engineers in this
remote part of India also lack access to the equipment needed to
perform basic quality control and assurance testing.
In
response, the Indian group Sustainable Hill Engineering and Design
(SHED)-led by one of Harries' former graduate students-seeks to
repopularize the ikra, a traditional bamboo-frame structure. Bamboo is
native to the region, largely resistant to earthquakes, and gentle on
the steep, loose-soil hillsides. The Pitt students develop
comprehensive material standards for bamboo construction, conduct
strength and design tests for bamboo structures, and, when in India,
help SHED tackle issues ranging from slope stability to clean energy.
Sharma has spent most of 2009 in Brazil at the Pontifícia Universidade
Católica do Rio de Janeiro studying the structural use of bamboo.
More information on the project is available on Pitt's Web site at www.chronicle.pitt.edu/?p=1613
More information on the Mondialogo Engineering Award is available on the Mondialogo's Web site at www.mondialogo.org
