Highlight
Mondialogo - Silver Award
Achievement/Results
Building With Bamboo Nets – Pitt, Indian Students International Engineering Award and 10,000-Euro Prize From United Nations-Daimler An international engineering award and a 10,000-Euro prize went to a team of students from the University of Pittsburgh and the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur (IITK) for their ongoing project in the Indian Himalayas to popularize, design, and build bamboo structures. The team received an Engineering Silver Award presented by Mondialogo, a global initiative of German automaker Daimler and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) that encourages intercultural collaboration. The Pitt-IITK team was among 12 Silver, 8 Gold, and 10 Bronze award winners announced during Mondialogo’s Nov. 6-9 convention in Stuttgart, Germany. The recipients were among 30 teams chosen in July from 932 research proposals from 94 countries.
The Pitt group is led by Bhavna Sharma, a Pitt Swanson School of Engineering PhD candidate and recipient of an Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship from the University’s Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation. Kent Harries, a structural engineering and mechanics professor in Pitt’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, serves as the project’s faculty advisor and leads students to India for fieldwork.
The students work in the steep, earthquake- and flood-prone mountains of Sikkim and Darjeeling, where modern construction materials threaten the environment and human safety. 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 as a sustainable and cost-effective design. 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.
Address Goals
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.
