Parel Vallei High School’s learners claimed the top two podium places when the South African Institution of Civil Engineering (SAICE) hosted its 19th annual Aqualibrium Water Competition, making it a hat-trick of wins for the Somerset West school.
After claiming the top place in the competition in 2020 and 2021, PV’s Grade 12 team, comprising Dajoon Kim, Jamie Morris and Caleb da Costa, upheld the winning streak by claiming first place. The school’s Grade 11 team of Jan Dalhuysen and Saskia Human claimed second place.
The aim of the competition is to distribute 3 F of water equally among three reservoirs (containers), placed randomly on a grid of 16 points.
On arrival, participants received a box with pipes and connectors of different diameters, and the teams are given an hour to build the water network and test the distribution before they were judged.
While the competition is simple to understand and fun to do, the underlying problem is highly complex – the three small reservoirs can be placed in more than 3 000 combinations, and there are 280 billion possible pipe networks for each of these combinations.
For Parel Vallei learners who are considering careers in chemical, mechatronic or mechanical engineering, as well as law and computer science as options, the Aqualibrium Water Competition presented a practical way to see what the field of civil engineering entails, while highlighting the importance of preserving natural water resources while applying physics and mathematics to a real-life engineering problem.
