Cardiff students' work recognised by South Wales Institute of Engineers

Two PhD students from Cardiff University School of Engineering have been awarded the South Wales Institute of Engineers’ 2017 David Douglas Award.

Syed Muaaz-Us-Salam was presented with the Award in recognition of work he undertook as part of the Cardiff University Undergraduate Researchers Programme (CUROP). His project, ‘Automated Compliance Checking of UK Building Regulations’, was supervised by Dr Thomas Beach in the School’s BRE Trust Centre for Sustainable Engineering.

The Award is presented annually to the author or authors of outstanding research submissions in the field of engineering, and is open to engineers under the age of thirty and postgraduate engineering students. It is the second successive year that a share of the prize has been awarded to a Cardiff University engineering student.

Syed completed the project over two months during the final year of his BEng Civil Engineering (Year in Industry) studies in 2016. The paper has also been shortlisted for the Institution of Civil Engineers’ Emerging Engineers Award, and Syed will be presenting his work to the ICE in June.

He is now six months into his PhD research on ‘Enhanced Deligninification and Methane Generation in Waste Repositories through In-Situ Techniques – Overcoming Heterogeneity’. His work is supported by a scholarship from the North Carolina-based Environmental Research & Education Foundation, and he is their first scholar from an institution outside of North America.

Quanquan Han, a PhD student with Professor Rossi Setchi and Professor Sam Evans received the award for his project entitled "Metal additive manufacturing advanced Al-based nanocomposites for aerospace and automotive".

Quanquan is a third year China Scholarship Council student who is working on Metal Additive Manufacturing Advanced Al-Al2O3 nanocomposites in the High Value Manufacturing research group.