Pretoria - The University of Pretoria’s (UP) Team Tujenge has done the institution proud by clinching second place in the Universities for Sustainable Development Goal 13 Award competition.
The team entered its small-scale solar-powered water purification system using plasma technology in the competition.
A joint venture between the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and Siemens Gamesa, the international competition is aimed at finding multidisciplinary solutions to climate-related problems.
UP was one of five participating universities invited to the competition alongside the US Arizona State University, Germany’s Göttingen University, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and Tsinghua University from China.
While Tsinghua University took first place with their digital solution on a new pathway to realise the intangible value of tropical rainforest, team Tujenge’s second-place spot is nothing to sniff at.
Team Tujenge was named the second-place winner during the International Conference on Sustainable Development 2022, a special side-event of the UN General Assembly in New York City on Monday.
Tujenge, which means “Let’s build” in Swahili, was made up of chemical engineering PhD students Samuel Babalola and Hilda Kyomuhimbo, along with Master’s student and project leader, also from the chemical engineering department, Victor Tshigo, and Master of Science student in environmental management Amogelang Booysen.
The university’s team worked with the rural village of Tshikuwi in Limpopo to obtain water for testing and film the video for their submission.
Currently, only two of the six boreholes in the village can be used, as water from the remaining boreholes is not fit for human consumption.
Residents have to boil their drinking water to ensure it is drinkable, a costly exercise, given electricity prices.
“Boiling water is not an energy-efficient method, and also does not remove all contaminants, such as manganese, as can be done through plasma technology,” Babalola said.
The team’s laboratory prototype could provide 120 litres of clean water every four hours in off-grid situations, enough for the use of at least eight households in the community.
The winning project was, according to the university, one of a number of projects its chemical engineers were working on aimed at developing easily-operated small-scale water purification systems that work without chemicals.
Through the benefit of three years of funding from the Water Research Commission of South Africa, Dr Samuel
Iwarere, head of the UP Plasma Research Unit and senior researcher in UP’s Department of Chemical Engineering, and his team at the Plasma Research Unit focus on combining plasma technology and renewable energy options to provide clean drinking water to rural off-the-grid communities.
Plasma technology is already used in plasma televisions and the likes of high-temperature laser cutting, as plasma is one of the four fundamental states of ordinary matter along with solids, gases and liquids.
Iwarere said he hoped that the research done in the unit would ultimately help people in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa who struggle to access clean, drinkable water.
“Many lives are lost through water-related diseases.”
Pretoria News