The Same Topic with Different Conception and X Loading—the 13th Extracurricular Science and Technology Innovation Competition for College Students and the Final of Architectural Engineering group of 2021 Science and Technology Month in SCE

The 13th Extracurricular Science and Technology Innovation Competition for College Students and the Final of Architectural Engineering group of 2021 Science and Technology Month in School of Civil Engineering (SCE) was held in X4250, Xipu Campus on the afternoon of April 24.

Huang Guohua, Chief Engineer of Sichuan Branch of Shanghai Construction No.1 (Group) Co., Ltd., and Xi Jiaqi, Manager of Human Resources Department were invited to this competition. They, together with Gao Wenjun and Zhao Lei, teachers from the Department of Architectural Engineering, SCE, Southwest Jiaotong University (SWJTU), served as judges for the final.

The final began at 1:00 p.m. At the beginning, the host, Mr. Li Jianghuai extended a warm welcome to all the guests and leaders, then Mr. Li briefly introduced the theme, significance and basic information of this competition.The Three-layer Ancient Tower Modelwas set for the Architectural Engineering group in this year’s competition. Since the registration was started in mid-March, a total of more than 30 teams participated in this competition with nearly 100 students, and finally more than 20 models were chosen to enter the final competition.

Then came the tense and exciting final. All teams were engaged in the final in order. And the final competition included three parts: model defense with PPT, loading test and judges’ comments. In the defense part, representatives from each team demonstrated not only the whole process of modeling, but also the advantages and highlights of the final work over the past month from modeling conception, structural design, component making, mechanical analysis and assembly construction in detail. Moreover, some teams visualized mechanical analysis via 3D modeling and finite element software calculations, while others produced simple animations to present the detailed structure of the model.

The most exciting session was the loading test. This competition required participants to set up loading points on the three layers of the ancient tower model, and the loading weight could be set by the participants themselves within the competition requirements. When the third loading was carried out, almost all the teachers and the audience were holding their breath, staring at the loading table all the time, and paying attention to the changes of the models. As long as the judge announced loading tests of the model were successful, the audience congratulated the participants with applause.

After this part, the four judges made comments on the models and raised some questions about structural design, construction technology and other aspects. For some excellent works, judges praised the highlights and innovations in the structure design of models, and provided suggestions for further optimization and upgrading, while for the work that failed to load, they pointed out the problems from the perspective of both professional knowledge and engineering practice, and encouraged participants to work hard in the next competition.

As the last model was presented and loaded, the whole competition came to an end successfully around 6:00 p.m., and the results of the competition would be posted on the website of SCE soon. During this competition, all the participants presented different understandings and thoughts on the same topic with exquisite design conception and beautiful models, which fully showed that students from SCE of SWJTU were not only afraid of difficulties, but also committed to innovations. We are looking forward to seeing that participants will perform better in the next competition.