June 2011

The highlight of this month is the culmination of the annual 'Chemical Technology' Awards, held annually by Crown Publications in association with SAIChE. A glittering evening event was held on the 22nd June at the Royal Johannesburg and Kensington Golf Club. Over 60 people attended and almost all of the winners and their supervisors were able to be present. This year's entries far exceeded even last year's. Let's hope this is a trend that is going to continue. We thank our sponsors for this year's awards, Anglo American Research, Vega Instruments SA and the CSIR, for their belief in this competition and what it stands for and for being prepared to show their support in a tangible way.

The Undergraduate Student of the Year prize, sponsored again by the CSIR, went to Sheldon Beangstrom for his paper, supervised by Prof Thokozani Majozi at the University of Pretoria and entitled 'Multiple level steam system synthesis: a novel graphical approach'. This could be described as an expansion of pinch technology into a more complicated system. In the Postgraduate Research Paper of the Year, sponsored by Vega Instruments SA, the judges decided to award a joint prize to two papers submitted by the University of Cape Town. The paper by Alexander Hesketh entitled 'Mitigating the generation of acid mine drainage from copper sulfide tailings impoundments in perpetuity - a case study for an integrated management strategy' was co-supervised by Dr Jennifer Broadhurst and Prof Sue Harrison. The other paper, entitled 'A case study for treating a reverse osmosis brine using Eutectic Freeze Crystallization - approaching a zero waste process', was co-authored by Dyllon Randall, Jeeten Nathoo and Alison Lewis.

The Energy category also saw a joint prize being awarded, this time to two students of Prof Harro von Blottnitz at UCT. Both papers deal with biogas plants, one being about capacity-cost and location-cost for plants in Africa and undertaken by Bamikole Amigun; the other, by Rethabile Melamu, discussed the design and equipment installation of a biogas digester for food waste methanization.

Last but not least, Tebogo Phetla won in the Water category for her paper on the removal and recovery of nickel, copper and iron from heavy metal, by reduction crystallization. Her work was undertaken at the University of Johannesburg under the supervision of Dr Edison Muzenda and Dr Freeman Ntuli.

Please take a look at the photos from the prize-giving (see link alongside). From the July issue we shall be running one or two articles each month, based on the winning entries for the competition, as well as some of the other interesting papers submitted by under- and postgrads alike.