INSEE-IESL CONCRETE MIX DESIGN COMPETITION 2018

INSEE is one of the leading foremost manufacturers of cement in Sri Lanka.  With this collaboration of Premier engineering professional body, the Institution of Engineers Sri Lanka (IESL) is launching the INSEE-IESL Concrete Challenge 2018. The judging criteria align with the competition is “Self-compacting concrete for sustainable construction”.

The university phase of this innovative competition was held on 25^th and 26^th of July organized with the participation of more than 20 groups from Department of Civil Engineering, University of Moratuwa. This university phase was organized by the INSEE company with the collaboration of Civil Engineering Society of the university.

The competition was held under the framework of set of rules and regulations & here the limit of group members in each group was set to five. As the initial step to enter the competition, the groups had to submit a proposal of their mix design components with the quantities required.

Then, the cube casting & testing of the results were conducted as the next step of the competition. Here, the raw materials were provided & the casted concrete of each group was subjected to V funnel test, U cone test and slump test. With the comparison of the results obtained by each group, the best three groups were finalized to represent University of Moratuwa at the Inter university level of the competition which is scheduled to conduct in the near future. (29 th of August) So, it was a great opportunity and an experience for every participant.

Congratulations to the top three teams of the competition who will be representing the university!!!

FIELD VISIT-KALUGANGA

The Kaluganga development project in the central province of Sri Lanka is a multipurpose water resources development scheme. The primary purpose of this project is to increase existing water supplies of drought-prone irrigation areas.

A field visit to Kaluganga was organized by the Civil Engineering society of University of Moratuwa on 14^th July ,2018.   We were guided by Dr.P.K.C.De Silva to get maximum benefits from this project. Thirty five students from level 2 and 4 participated in this visit. We left university around 4.30 a.m. for the project which is situated in Pallegama, Matale.

Initially, we had an introductory lecture done by Eng. G.H.L.Kumarasiri. He said that the Kaluganga project commenced on 2014/04/02 and it was budgeted to cost Rs.13 Billion. The contractor for the project is Sinohydro Corporation Ltd. The main purpose of the project is to transfer 100 Million cubic meters of water annually to MoragahaKanda reservoir to fulfill downstream demand.

Design period of Kaluganga project is 100 years. We were able to visit some of the ongoing project structures such as main dam, spillway, diversion tunnel, canal and saddle dam. Engineers who were working in the project explained us about the structure and what else will go down next.

We were not able to get access to moragahakanda, so we visited the view point and observed the dam and reservoir.

The field visit was really beneficial since we got experience in irrigation and water supply etc. It was very useful for us to gain information about the project from the engineers who were lively involved in it.