Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology
School of Engineering
Department of Chemical Engineering
Selected Highlights from Research Findings
The two biggest cost drivers in running a microbrewery are the cost of labour and the cost of capital. Students from Computer Science teamed up with Prof Heydenrych of the Chemical ngineering Department to develop a low-cost, automated microbrewery. The time saving of approximately 4 hours per day can save half of the labour cost, and the use of embedded microprocessor controllers adds less than R5000 to the cost of a conventional microbrewery. It has the added benefit of improving the consistency of the beer quality from batch to batch, and between different microbreweries that are run on a franchise basis. The students successfully completed this project, which won the IBM prize for the best open source project of the year
Contact person: Prof MD Heydenrych.
Long-life mosquito netting: Progress was made towards the development of a long-life polypropylene (PP) mosquito net that will conform to World Health Organization (WHO) specifications. Laboratory-scale development has been completed and the first pilot scale production of PP yarn was successfully produced in December 2006.
Urea-based moulding compounds for investment casting: New urea-based thermoplastic compounds have been developed for application in investment casting. The work was done by PhD student Hilary Rutto from Kenia.
He formulated new resin systems and optimized a polymer compounding process to prepare the urea-based moulding compounds. The effect of composition on the mechanical, thermal, surface and flow property values of the formulation were studied and this allowed the optimization of compound composition to meet the specifications required in industrial investment casting practice. The formulation and its manufacturing process are in the process of being industrialized
Contact person: Prof WW Focke.
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