AGH UST students win the National EBEC Finals

---

The team of AGH UST students won the National Finals of the European BEST Engineering Competition (EBEC). This is one of the largest engineering contests in Europe. This national win means that the AGH University of Science and Technology will represent Poland in the European Finals, which will be held remotely between 22 and 30 July 2021.

During the EBEC, students compete in two events: case study and team design. The former is a theory-based competition requiring that the contestants develop a creative and innovative solution to a technical problem or optimise a well-known issue using supplied data. In this category, the participants should demonstrate their ability to think ‘outside the box’ as well as their analytical skills. Team design, on the other hand, is where students design and construct a device that will perform some pre-defined functions. This category enables the participating students to translate the knowledge they gained when studying into practice.

The team of winners representing AGH UST included four students from the Faculty of Materials Science and Ceramics: Maciej Skorupski (Leader), Marcelina Stasik, Jan Stawiarski and Rafał Twaróg. All of them are members of the Nucleus Research Group based in the Faculty. The team entered for the case study category.

The competition required that the contestants design a bunker that would provide people living in the U.S. with a shelter following a large-volume supervolcanic eruption. The task involved designing the building, developing methods of air and water purification, food production as well as – intriguingly – determining the form of government for the period spent in the bunker. The task came with an additional challenge of assuming specific time brackets: 2-6, 6-10 and 10-14 years from the moment of the eruption. The students had to address the challenges that came with the passage of time: increasing population and production of staple materials necessary to sustain human existence as well as a plan of transferring people back to the surface after 14 years of living in the bunker.

AGH UST students presented a project called “Flower City: how lava and plants can save our lives”, which is a network of bunker complexes, with each complex seen from above resembling a five-leaved flower. The Flower City uses construction materials made from ashes and volcanic rocks that would solidify on the Earth’s surface – “lava”. The project focuses on numerous plants as much as on the natural symbiosis and production of plant-based materials (such as the biodegradable polyactide) – “plants”. The Jury, composed of researchers from technical universities in Wrocław and Łódź, appreciated the ecological approach demonstrated in the project and the well-though-out structure of the bunkers.

The EBEC Poland event is an arena of competition for Poland’s six leading technical universities which BEST (Board of European Students of Technology) is active at – that is: Warsaw University of Technology, the AGH-UST University of Science and Technology, Gdańsk University of Technology, Łódź University of Technology, Silesian University of Technology and Wrocław University of Technology – the organiser and host of this year’s finals.

The National EBEC Finals were held remotely from 26 to 29 May 2021. The final event saw the competition of 12 four-person teams that had made it through earlier stages organised locally in selected cities. Each team was challenged with tasks from a category they had chosen for themselves.

In the European Finals we will see students from 32 countries, representing over 80 Europe’s top universities.

---