Durban - Final year Mechanical Engineering students from the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) unveiled their engineering projects at the annual Mechanical Engineering Open Day at the Howard College Campus.
The projects include an electric transporter powered by solar energy, an archery device for quadriplegic athletes, a device that includes the illusion of fruit growing on trees and many others.
Professor Glen Bright, Dean of Mechanical Engineering, said they are 10 month projects, where groups work together to research, innovate and design and produce a product.
All of the projects have a purpose, with at least 20 percent of them have hit the market over the years.
“We want to run something that has value and it must be functional,” Bright said.
“What is unique is that we are the only university that does projects like this in groups. Having a group gives you a better product, it gives you a product that’s functional.”
“We are also aware that some of our projects must help and impact the community. So we are critically aware that we want to assist the community where we can. So we balance our projects with community awareness projects, we balance them with research, design, innovation projects and we also balance them with pure mechanical, which are the vehicle mechanics,” he said.
He said some of the projects have a commercial future where they could become commercial and have viability, especially those for communities. Some projects are continuations that have been built over the years, so as technology improves and other projects are for research purposes.
“We have a division in the university called incubate which basically takes a product and incubate it, it’s a pathway, it’s a vehicle. From there we approach the municipalities, then the government through the national research foundation and through technology innovation team. So there are branches of the government that looks at specifically projects. They approach us through the end of year knowing we have these products available,” he said.
The team working on the SERAFF Solar Furnace Capability Enhancements inherited the project from past years.
Payal Dhunlal, group leader for the project, said their project is one of those projects that are ongoing and can be developed further and it is very impactful in society. Her team is made up of three other students, Desmond Hakurekwi, Yastil Rughbeer and Athina Parshotam.
“This project is situated on the Cato Manor reservoir which is an eThekwini Municipality site, so there are regulations which did make it a bit difficult but we did manage to overcome them and also the scale of the project, it required a lot of manpower and because we are breaking new ground and it’s research and it’s something new, it hasn’t been done before, this is the first dedicated solar furnace in South Africa, we always learning and we don’t have much to build upon,” Dhunlal said.
She said the sun rays hit the solar tracking heliostat perpendicularly, which thereafter reflects the rays in a parallel fashion to the parabolic concentrator that concentrates the solar readings to a focal point. At that point temperatures and flux is recorded and used for research purposes.
“A new edition to our project is the louvre shutter system which controls the flux magnitude,” she said. “We also made structural enhancements to the facility. We are trying to improve the current concentrator so we actually manufactured a prototype concentrator which is being tested and it proving to be very cost effective as opposed to this concentrator,” she explained.
She also said they have a heat exchanging system which they are researching.
“Second semester is testing and that is actually from August onwards and we’ve had a lot of rain and thunder showers. It has been quite difficult to test and it has put a lot of delays,” she said.
She said their project cost R30 000.