Dr Hein Badenhorst, senior lecturer in the Department of Chemical Engineering, leads the Bulk Carbon Materials Research Group that forms part of the DST-NRF SARChI Chair in Carbon Technology and Materials. This platform is currently being used for research into different aspects of concentrated solar energy.
In 2015, Dr Badenhorst’s team won third place in the Innovation Hub’s Gauteng Accelerator Programme, or GAP Green competition, for their novel solar concentrator design, which uses off-the-shelf components to reach radiation levels of up to 1 500 suns.
Dr Badenhorst explains that their work is aimed at bringing down the cost of solar energy plants due to the strong focus on local input and content. “Past experience,” he says, “has shown that importing overseas technology and hoping it will survive in local conditions is a mistake. We look at using locally available raw materials and tailoring solutions to the South and southern African context. We believe this is the only way to ensure longevity of any solution to South Africa’s energy situation.”
The capability and capacity of solar energy generation companies to store, transmit and distribute captured solar energy, and carbon footprint reduction, are core to the group’s work. Thermal storage offers several advantages such as using industrial waste energy in new and efficient ways. The team is looking at innovative techniques to incorporate waste material, in this case recycled rubber tyres, into affordable means of harvesting solar energy.
The team has also designed several applications such as a flash-based desalination technique to recover potable water from seawater and from contaminated or brackish sources.
In 2015 two publications by members of the research group stood out. The first, published in the highly acclaimed international journal, Carbon, featured contributions from two young postgraduate students. The second is a publication in the international journal, Solar Energy, and featured a novel process for recovering energy from phase change materials, using the high-energy density of latent heat. The concept was developed through the National Research Foundation’s Blue Skies funding and Dr Badenhorst hopes that it will develop into a fully-fledged, long-term project.
