Fourth year Engineering student Cam Millar has been announced the winner of the Institution of Structural Engineers’ Guthrie Brown Award for his paper titled 'Design of the world’s first sprayed-net, hyperboloid, lattice ice structure'.
The Harbin project was fascinating and a great showcase of Cambridge engineering and architecture talent. It is an honour to win this award and it is a credit to the whole team for their amazing work.
Student Cam Millar
The award, presented as part of the Institution’s People and Papers Awards 2020, is in recognition of Cam’s ‘paper of merit’, published in the Institution’s magazine The Structural Engineer.
The paper provided details of the design and construction of the world’s first hyperboloid cable net ice structure – a structure that won Cam and his team the Best Design and Construction Works Award at the 2018 Harbin Institute of Technology’s annual International Ice and Snow Innovation Construction Competition.
Over a seven-day period, a team of 11 students from the Department of Engineering and the Department of Architecture designed and built the ice structure on a 10m x 10m plot in temperatures as low as -20°C. They created a hyperboloid cable net ice structure that was strong in compression and weak in tension. Using a rope suspended from a crane, the structure was sprayed with ice to create a rigid hyperboloid.
Cam said: "The Harbin project was fascinating and a great showcase of Cambridge engineering and architecture talent. It is an honour to win this award and it is a credit to the whole team for their amazing work. It feels amazing to continue the Cambridge traditions of pushing boundaries with novel and exciting projects. Working in such a skilled team and on such an expressive project has definitely inspired me to work on more boundary-pushing structural projects."
