On the 1st of October we visited Sinotech Inc. with a small group of students from the National Taiwan University (NTU). Sinotech Engineering Consultants Inc. is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing engineering consulting services and was founded in 1970. Sinotech Inc. is one of the main organizations that performs tests dams and bridges. They are testing a lot of soil samples for mostly private companies, but also the government, who wants to construct a building, dam, or bridges. The NTU is a national public research university in Taipei and has been regarded as the most prestigious university of Taiwan. The university was founded in 1928 and has a total of 56 departments, 133 graduate institutes, and about 60 different research
centers. As mentioned, the NTU works together with a lot of different research centers and Sinotech Inc. is one of them.

When we arrived at the Sinotech Inc. building, we went to a lecture room where first Rowan gave a ‘small’ introduction about the University of Twente and our Study Tour Pacific Perspectives. From Sinotech Inc. there were some high-ranked persons, like the Chairman Tseng, Director Chi, Deputy Director Kao and Dr. Huang. After Rowan gave our presentation, we got an introduction about what Sinotech Inc. was doing. Since 1980 it has the largest lab for soil and
rock testing. Form 2005 they used deep well investigation technology. Since 2012 they have a multi-phase flow test, from 2020 a high stress temper and from 2021 the advanced offshore wind farm lab. Here they test the soil of the seabed where construction companies want to build an offshore wind farm. Since 2014 they have been working on a total of twelve projects for offshore wind. When they start with such a project, they took samples sand or rock from the seabed. These samples are one meter in length and in total they take 2000 samples from the ground. When they take these samples, they do not know which test they will perform. In total they can executed 23 different tests in their laboratories, where these are the important ones: 1D-consolidation test, static triaxial test, cyclic triaxial test, advanced cyclic triaxial test, cyclic simple shear test, resonant column test, and ring shear test. From these tests the cyclic triaxial test and advanced cyclic triaxial test are the most important. The cyclic triaxial test can gather data from seismic activities, while the advanced one can model earthquakes which is very
important for buildings in Taiwan. After this introduction we got a tour through the different labs to see the equipment. Unfortunately, there were no tests going on at that moment so we could only see the different equipment. The students that joined us from the NTU were working on a floating wind farm and participated in the Floating Wind Challenge 2024 in Marseille under the name OrthoFloat. They needed to
create a wind farm that floats on the ocean, so they can be constructed in deeper water. After making different prototypes and a lot of testing they came up with a design that made use of a natural gyroscope such that the blades were always facing the wind. For this they got the best innovation award.
Concluded, it was an interesting excursion to see how the soil is tested in Taiwan for the construction of buildings and offshore wind farms. Especially the difference with the
Netherlands, since in Taiwan they are more focused on earthquakes and the testing of rock samples