Building With Bamboo Nets Pitt, Indian Students a Nod for United Nations-Daimler International Engineering Award

PITTSBURGH-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

###

7/30/09/tmw