2008 is proving to be a bumper year for the School of Civil & Resource Engineering. The UWA Civil Engineering Futures Foundation welcomed SKM, Theiss, VDM Consulting, Monadelphous and McConnell Dowell, bringing the total number of members to 21.

A major initiative of the Foundation, through which laptop computers are supplied to all second year students enrolled in the Civil Engineering program, continued this year: 150 future Civil Engineers were presented with laptops at a sundowner on 8 April.

BHP Billiton Iron Ore’s generous laptop sponsorship for second-year students enrolled in the Mining Engineering program continued this year, with 28 future Mining Engineers being presented with laptops at a Sundowner on April 10.

In research news, Professors Andrew Deeks, Hong Hao and Barry Lehane received new ARC Discovery Grants commencing in 2008 and totalling more than $600,000.
The School’s research performance was strong in 2007 with more than 80 refereed scientific research papers published in international journals and conferences.

There have been significant industry funded research projects undertaken, including a project for Woodside on scour around offshore pipelines, directed by Professor Liang Cheng and performed in collaboration with Dalian University of Technology, one of China’s leading engineering universities.

The experimental work was performed in Dalian, while the analytical work was conducted at UWA. 2007 also saw the construction of a blast simulator of unique design, capable of measuring the performance of materials at extremely fast strain rates. A patent application for the design is pending. The project is being led by Professor Hong Hao.